Month: July 2012

Mobile Is Where The Growth Is  →

Fred Wilson on how web growth is somewhat plateauing and mobile is growing like a weed:

All of this is good news for entrepreneurs since they are in the best position to take advantage of all of these changing dynamics. It is not as good news for those who find themselves operating a big Internet business started more than five years ago. You are going to need to make a hard right turn super fast without flipping over the car.

In the past fifteen years, we have seen Microsoft go from being an unstoppable force to being a non-factor in many important new markets, we have seen Google go from being an unstoppable force to being a non-factor in many important new markets, and I suspect we are going to see Facebook struggle with the same thing. RIM is dying quickly now. Yahoo! is a question mark.

I also loved this observation:

Mobile does not reward feature richness. It rewards small, application specific, feature light services. I have said this before but I will say it again. The phone is the equivalent of the web application and the mobile apps you have on your home screen(s) are the features.

I remember seeing a lot of tweets during John Gruber’s surprise talk at Úll, and how he said something along the lines of iOS being like a game where users build their own levels via the apps they install.

Mobile Is Where The Growth Is

50 Things I’ve Learned About Publishing a Weblog

Last week marked the 5-year anniversary of shawnblanc.net.

Writing this site has been and continues to be a lot of work and a lot of fun. Thanks to all of you who have stopped by at some point over the past five years and stuck around to continue reading. And thanks to all the members who make it possible for me to write this site every day.

Over the last half-decade I’ve learned a few things which have helped me persevere in my writing and keep the site growing. Here they are as an unordered list.

  • Show up every day.
  • Give yourself permission to stink.
  • As your talent as a writer grows your own perception of your writing will likely stay the same.
  • I still get a little bit nervous every time I post anything, even a trivial link. And I think that’s OK because whatever goes on the internet is instantly global and permanent — don’t write something you wouldn’t want your mom or son to read.
  • Saying no to opportunities and ideas is very important.
  • Go to conferences.
  • Build relationships.
  • Being Internet Famous is like owning a semi-successful coffee shop on the corner of town. It’s not so much about being popular but rather that you have a sustainable customer base to keep the lights on.
  • Always be honest.
  • Always be sincere.
  • There are a lot of people with similar interests as you. Your honesty about your opinions is what will help set you and your work apart.
  • Hold fast to your values and viewpoints.
  • Build your website on trust.
  • Don’t be rude.
  • Attention is far more important than pageviews.
  • Sensationalizing your work reaps no worthwhile long-term benefits.
  • Take your work seriously.
  • Don’t take yourself too seriously.
  • Lots of amazing and interesting people have low follower counts on Twitter.
  • Read.
  • Go outside.
  • Work hard. Really hard. But don’t work nonstop.
  • Don’t be embarrassed about trying to make a buck doing what you love.
  • Fiddling with your setup is also known as procrastination.
  • Inbox Zero means not allowing the incoming to dictate your priorities.
  • Send short emails.
  • Send shorter emails than that.
  • Admit when you’re wrong.
  • Never pretend to know more than you actually do.
  • An article doesn’t always have to be published the moment after you’ve written the last paragraph.
  • Think about it.
  • Have an ideal reader.
  • Find an editor you trust.
  • Don’t use cheap hosting.
  • Encourage others.
  • Family always comes first.
  • Producing a great project requires a lot of time and attention.
  • Know your definition of good enough. Make your work great, but know that it won’t be 100-percent perfect and it’s more important to hit publish.
  • Give credit to your readers. They’re smart.
  • I have never liked the word “blog”.
  • You’re not a blogger, you’re a writer.
  • Thinking about writing is not the same as writing.
  • Reading about writing is not the same as writing.
  • Tweeting about writing is not the same as writing.
  • Having a conversation about writing is not the same as writing.
  • Break those broken workflow habits.
  • Modern Art: “I could have done that.” “Yeah, but you didn’t.”

Blogging: “I could have written that.” “Yeah, but you didn’t.”
– Trust your gut.
– Take risks.
– Learn something new every day.

I realize much of the above list actually just common-sense life advice. And so if I had to narrow it down to what I consider to be the most important advice I have for writing a successful weblog, it would be consistency and honesty.

Consistency for two reasons: (a) the internet thrives on patterns and regularity; showing up every day lets people know they can rely on you to be there. And (b) even if you’re a talentless dweeb, writing every day will help you become a better writer and a better thinker. And it’s the combination of consistency, talent, and thoughtfulness that will help you to turn your site from hobby into something more.

Honesty is the most important element for building a readership that trusts you. Being honest and sticking to your guns is how you earn the respect and long-term attention of your readership. And that too will help you turn your site from a hobby into something more.

50 Things I’ve Learned About Publishing a Weblog

Sponsor: TextExpander  →

The new TextExpander 4 from Smile dramatically increases the options for automating your work with advanced “fill-in” snippet types. They are great for creating form letter templates that can be personalized on the fly. Check out the

(http://syndicateads.net/s/u) and see the new multi-line text fields, multiple choice popups, and optional text blocks in action.

Registered TextExpander users can upgrade for $15. (There’s no charge for the upgrade if you purchased after January 15, 2012.)

Still haven’t tried TextExpander? Download the free demo! There’s even a new Snippet Creation Snippet to get you started.

My thanks to Smile Software for sponsoring the RSS feed this week to promote TextExpander. This is one of those apps that I’m handicapped on my Mac without. I use TextExpander not just for expanding text but also for fixing common typos, making sure I spell certain people’s names right, powering through emails more efficiently, properly capitalizing certain product names, pasting code, and a whole, whole lot more. They shipped a big update few weeks ago and it’s definitely worth checking out.

Sponsorship by The Syndicate

Sponsor: TextExpander

Update Regarding the “Death” of Pageviews as a Metric  →

On Friday I wrote this sentence:

Metrics like pageviews and subscriber counts are a cheap and dying metric.

Re-reading it, it sounds to me like a sensational exaggeration. And that was not my intention. I apologize for that.

My intention was to try and convey that the ratio of pageviews to engaged readers is not as high as it once was.

Perhaps a better analogy would have been to relate pageviews to economic inflation. As pageviews become more common, their overall value decreases. Just as a dollar today doesn’t buy what it used to, so too a pageview isn’t necessarily worth what it used to be.

Update Regarding the “Death” of Pageviews as a Metric

Why Links Matter  →

Mathew Ingram:

One reason people often give for the failure to link (or the “hiding” of links at the bottom of an article, for which some have criticized outlets like The Verge) is that the financial model for digital media — that is, advertising — relies on pageviews, and one of the ways to juice those numbers is to pretend that you broke a story. But whether this inflates reader numbers in the short term, it ultimately depreciates the value of the blog that does it, and that leads to a loss of trust — and trust is far more important than pretending you have a scoop, the half-life of which is now measured in minutes.

Metrics like pageviews and subscriber counts are a cheap and dying metric. As the global user base of the Internet grows, and as more and more millions of people use internet-connected phones we’re finding that 100,000 pageviews today is not the same as 100,000 pageviews was yesterday. The truest metric of a website’s value is found in the amount of trust, attention, and influence it has. But you cannot easily quantify trust, and so most business models are still predominantly based on pageviews.

Marco Arment recently gave a way to help spot a website that is aiming for a business model based on trust versus one based on pageviews:

If you’re truly providing value, you should have the confidence to send your audience away, knowing that they’ll come back to you.

Update: I want to clarify what I mean by pageviews being a cheap and dying metric. Re-reading that statement, it sounds to me like an exaggeration, and that is not what I meant. My apologies for that.

My intention is to try and communicate that the ratio of pageviews to engaged readers is not as high as it once was, and it will continue declining as social networks and active Web users continue to grow.

Perhaps a better analogy is to relate the value of pageviews to economic inflation. As pageviews become more common, their overall value decreases. Just as a dollar today doesn’t buy what it used to, so too a pageview isn’t necessarily worth what it used to be.

Why Links Matter

Apple’s Most Upgradable Laptop  →

With all the hubbub about the non-upgradability and user-fixable parts of Apple’s latest products, Thomas Brand looks back to the 1998 PowerBook G3, codenamed “Wallstreet”, Apple’s most upgradable and “future proof” laptop:

In addition to all of the available built-to-order options, the Wallstreet also offered an impressive array of expandability. The PowerBook G3 Series included two hot swappable docking bays on either side. The left hand bay could accommodate a battery, a 3.5” floppy disk, a Iomega Zip drive, a third-party magnetic optical drive, or even a secondary hard drive. The right hand bay was larger and could accommodate all of the above plus a full size 5.25” optical drive. A small internal nickel-cadmium battery allowed swapping of the main batteries while the computer “slept,” and with two batteries installed at the same time the PowerBook G3 Series could last up to seven hours on a single charge. A maximum of 4 MBs of graphics memory limited the PowerBook G3 Series’ 3D performance, but an optional PCMCIA hardware controller made the Wallstreet the first Apple portable capable of DVD playback.

Sounds like the sorts of machines we now like to make fun of.

Apple’s Most Upgradable Laptop

My Socks Would be Buttery  →

It’s good to be back, and this week’s show was fun. My wife even says so (she always sits upstairs with Noah and listens to the live broadcast). Ben and I talked about several things including writing reviews of beta apps, using Checkmark and how it works alongside other reminder apps on the iPhone, and Belkin’s new WeMo device.

My Socks Would be Buttery

Review: Checkmark for iPhone

Checkmark is an upcoming reminders app for the iPhone. And it is awesome.

For some folks, Apple’s default apps are not powerful enough or feel absent of features. As such, many 3rd-party devs have made a name and a living for themselves by building “pro” versions of the apps that already ship on the iPhone. A few examples:

And now: Reminders → Checkmark

Apple’s Reminders app is relatively simple. Your to-do items (a.k.a. reminders) can be viewed based on the list they are in or the date they are due. These to-dos can be triggered to go off at a particular time or when leaving or arriving at a particular location. Or they can have no trigger and simply be an item which needs to be done.

For me, the Reminders app on my iPhone has but one interface: Siri. Though my go-to to-do app is OmniFocus there are often times when setting a quick and simple reminder via Siri is easier.1 Especially when those reminders are location based, such as: “Remind me to swing by the post office and buy stamps when I leave here.” Or: “Remind me to take out the trash when I get home.”

There are, however, two quibbles I have with Siri and Reminders:

  • Oftentimes I am in a situation where I can’t or don’t want to use Siri. But setting a location-based reminder manually is a surprisingly arduous task. And if it’s for a location other than my current one, then there is much scrolling to find the entry in my contacts list. Not to mention, if the location is not already in my list of contacts then I cannot add a reminder to trigger based on that place.
  • Once a reminder for another location is set, Siri often proves to be unreliable at reminding me. For example, in my contacts I have cards for my local Walmart and Lowe’s, but asking Siri to remind me to buy batteries when I get to Walmart does not always work. The next time I go to Walmart it’s hit or miss that the reminder will actually trigger (why this is, I do not know).

Like Reminders+

Checkmark solves the aforementioned Siri and Reminder shortcomings and then some.

In terms of reliability and ease of use, Checkmark beats the built-in Reminders app in several areas (especially if you are manually tapping in a time or location-based reminder — Checkmark is leaps and bounds faster at this). And, as mentioned above, on more than one occasion the built-in Reminders app has failed to trigger a location-based reminder. With Checkmark, not a single one of my reminders have failed to trigger.

Checkmark’s biggest downside is its current inability to work with Siri.2 Of course Siri and the Reminders app have a few downsides of their own. And so I find myself using a combination of both apps.

What I’m using Siri for:

  • Quick reminders based on “here”. It’s easiest to let the iPhone set a quick geofence around wherever I am and then remind me of something when I leave that fence (“remind me to swing by the grocery store and pick up a gallon of milk when I leave here”).

  • Trivial, time-based reminders (“remind me to check the brisket in 45 minutes”).

What I’m using Checkmark for:

Where Checkmark truly shines is with location-based reminders that trigger on arrival. It’s fast and totally reliable.

This is something that Siri should be able to do, but in practice I’ve found her to be unreliable at reminding me to get AAA batteries next time I’m at Walmart. Which is one reason I’ve found Checkmark to be far superior to the built-in Reminders app for these types of reminders.

When you launch the app there is a “home screen” with icons for each of your saved locations. I have 7 commonly-visited places set up in Checkmark.

Checkmark's Home Screen

Tapping on a pre-saved location takes you to the list of reminders which are set to trigger around that place. From there you can tap to add a reminder. Checkmark gives you options to trigger the reminder or arrival or departure and even to time-delay it.

Checkmark: Add a Reminder

It takes a whopping three taps (one of which is launching the app) to get to the screen for adding a new location-based reminder. Put simply: Checkmark is fast. I use it for all my location-based reminders. I only wish I could set a repeating location-based reminder (such as one that reminded me every time I went to the bank to log the miles in Trip Cubby).

Also notable is Checkmark’s conservative battery usage. Nearly all location-based apps that I try seem to drain my battery like its their job. But I have no qualms letting Checkmark run in the background.

On top of its reliability and ease of use is a pixel-perfect design. Checkmark is, in this writer’s opinion, of the best kind of apps: thoughtful, useful, and attractive.

  1. OmniFocus for iPhone has the clever ability to look at the items in your Reminders list and add them to your OmniFocus inbox. Thus, enabling you to add items to OmniFocus using Siri. You can set this up in OmniFocus’s settings. ↵
  2. Ryan Cash, one of the guys behind Checkmark, told me they are working on the best way to integrate the app with Siri. ↵
Review: Checkmark for iPhone

On Time Management  →

Shawn Adrian:

Every time you say no to spending your time one way, you’re saying yes to spending it a different way.

I couldn’t agree more. One of my favorite quotes about time management is from Robert Louis Stevenson: “Perpetual devotion to what a man calls his business, is only to be sustained by perpetual neglect of many other things.”

It’s why I started limiting my time spent doing email rather than continually aiming for an empty inbox.

(Via Chris Bowler.)

On Time Management

Andrew Kim’s Microsoft Brand Update Experiment  →

Andrew Kim:

I decided that Microsoft needs to be a brand that represents the future. Be slightly aggressive unlike Apple and Google’s friendly marketing. Promise to deliver the future today. Be almost science fiction.

It’s a well-done brand proposal and I like Andrew’s premise that Microsoft could use some edge to their brand to accompany their aggressive new hardware/software plans.

Andrew Kim’s Microsoft Brand Update Experiment