Friendly Fire in the War on Spam – Part 3: The boy who cried SPAM

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

There are many people out there who run legitimate email newsletters. Newsletters provide useful information to subscribers and they are a great way for companies to stay in touch with their client base. Those who send newsletters have to be very careful about how they handle their mailing lists. Most people who send newsletters are careful and concerned about stopping spam. The CAN-SPAM act is a good starting point, but those who care about their customers agree that these are probably the most important "best practices" for sending email newsletters:

• Use a self-managing mailing list or service
• Include unsubscribe instructions with every email you send
• Require a double-opt-in for new subscribers (Double opt in refers to the process of signing up for a newsletter then requiring a confirmation response from the email address that was sent. This way an email address cannot be added by an imposter)

Even with all these precautions legitimate emailers get flogged as spammers. But these are skilled, tech-savvy people who seriously oppose spamming. How can they be accused of spamming when they've been so careful? The sad answer is that it happens when a legitimate newsletter is flagged as spam by one of their own subscribers.

The double-opt-in signup makes it impossible for an email address to be accidentally added to a mailing list. Someone has to choose to subscribe and then verify their wish to subscribe. But a month later, they may have forgotten all about it. They complain to an ISP about this spammer or hit the "Spam" button on their email client. Just like that, the emailer has been accused of spamming. The consequences of being accused of spamming can be drastic and swift, often resulting in non-delivered emails and blacklisting. The anti-spam movement is so strong right now that an ISP might immediately deny service to the newsletter sender. This happens without any crime being done, without any proof, and without any warning to the person managing the newsletter.

What's most alarming about this problem is that there really is no defense against it. This is a problem that is totally out of the control of people who use email legitimately. Email recipients have been empowered to take on spam. People have a lot of rage when it comes to spam and they have no qualms about practicing mob justice. Apparently the AOL email interface is particularly empowering when it comes to accusing spammers by providing a large spam button… that has serious consequences.

The only solution may be to abandon email newsletters all together. As RSS technology becomes a part of the daily lives of mainstream internet users we ca see an alternative to using email to deliver content. There can be no argument about who is subscribing to RSS information. The recipient requests the information only when they want to, or when their reader has been programmed to.

Interestingly this corresponds nicely with the advent of blogging. Blog content authoring tools can easily be directly liked to RSS feeds. By inviting site visitors to subscribe to your RSS feed, they get a much greater amount of anonymity and you get a huge drop in stress and no possible way of being accused of spamming. But for the moment, you can't reach the same audience with RSS that you can with email. But t writing is on the wall. RSS, or more precisely the idea of RSS as a means of people gathering up information that they like will likely replace the "pushed" architecture of the email newsletter in time.

Friendly Fire in the War on Spam – Part 2: Blacklists

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

There are several organizations that maintain blacklists of IP addresses that send out spam. Internet service providers (ISPs) subscribe to these lists to filter out email that comes from these sources. The idea being that this will keep spam from being delivered to their email users. There is no silver bullet for spam and this can be a heavy-handed practice. It works fine when email comes from a private IP address, but what if someone with a large ISP email address, like yahoo.com, starts sending out spam? Should the originating IP address be blocked? This could block every email that comes from a yahoo.com email address. There are plenty of legitimate non-spamming users who have @yahoo.com email addresses. I use yahoo as an example, but this could be applied to any ISP. Most blacklist managers are aware there are large numbers of legitimate users out there and generally do not blacklist larger service providers without good reason. An example of a good reason is when an email service provider shows a total inability to monitor and control spam that originates from their network. This is a real problem for email service providers. Naturally they want customers but at the same time they must monitor and deny service to customers who are spammers. They effectively have to look for customers to turn away. Never the less, no ISP should tolerate spamming in their network. It has serious repercussions on their legitimate users. If an ISP becomes blacklisted, legitimate customers don't get the service they pay for.

Legitimate email users should be aware of this. If your ISP harbors spammers or is soft on spam, there is a chance that your ISPs IP addresses will be added to a blacklist or has been added already. These may well be the same IP addresses that you use to send email. As a result, your email can be labeled as spam, regardless of the content. The best defense is to use an ISP that has a strong anti-spam policy and avoid working with the ISPs on this list.

Get out of there:
You should avoid ISPs that are "spam friendly" or "spam infested." There are plenty of ethical considerations but they should be avoided for tangible reasons. Spam exploited ISPs generally suffer from poor server performance and lost emails. You can also become associated with spammers just by your relative proximity to each other on the internet. This can lead to frustrating returned emails and long sessions arguing with blacklist managers and your ISP to get the common IP address you share with spammers released. The best bet is to avoid these ISPs all together.

Newsletter Problems:
Blacklists can be a major problem for those who send out email newsletters. One of the things many email newsletter management services don't talk about is their delivery rate. Because newsletter services send out so much email their IP addresses are constantly fighting a battle against being blacklisted. Most of the time newsletter services are in the right. It's usually a case of an email behaving like spam or one of their customers making a mistake that trips a flag. This can lead to the newsletter service provider having their IP address blacklisted.

What you need to know is whether or not the IP addresses of your newsletter service provider have been blacklisted. Some services never make any claims to their delivery rate, only how many emails you're allowed to send… with no assurances that your email will ever arrive. One service provider that does speak about this issue is Constant Contact who takes managing the reputation of their IP addresses quite seriously.

Friendly Fire in the War on Spam – Part 1: Filters

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

Not only is spam incredibly frustrating, it continues to hamper legitimate business in new ways. Sending out honest email newsletters is becoming increasingly difficult for a number of reasons. Most of these are the direct result of entanglements with tools and protocols that are in place to protect users from spam.

A big problem with spam prevention today is that most anti-spam software can report "false positives" where legitimate email is labeled and treated like spam. The spam filtering software looks over an email message if it fits the profile of spam. This can be done at the server level, an IT department's Exchange server, or at the client level, a copy of Outlook or Eudora on a desktop. The problem is that determining what is spam and what isn't spam is a very delicate job. Unfortunately most anti-spam software just isn't up to it. You run the risk of either tossing legitimate email in the trash without seeing it or only eliminating a small fraction of incoming spam. Granted that cutting out half of the spam you receive is a positive step but it's hardly an ideal solution especially when you loose real email in the process.

Dealing with incoming spam:
In my experience, most anti-spam software causes as much hassle as it prevents. This is especially true for people like me who depend on email for new business leads. Those of us in this situation simply cannot afford a false positive because that costs us business. For a long time my solution was to run a spam filter on my email client at a low level. Set this way it would flag obvious spam and let the rest through to my inbox for me to deal with. I still had a ton of spam coming into my inbox but it wasn't quite as bad. Even with a low grade filter I had to skim through my spam folder once per day to look at hundreds of emails to avoid throwing out something important.

The problem with these types of filters is that the software is making a guess. Emails that have blank subjects or subjects like "hello" or "hey" look a lot like spam. Heaven help you if you actually happen to be in the mortgage business or work for Pfizer.

Better than filters:
Since software isn't up to the task of determining what is spam and what isn't spam what can we do? Cloudmark has developed a unique and quite brilliant solution to the problem. Rather than rely on software to make judgment calls on what is or isn't spam, Cloudmark leverages the opinions of millions of email users. Here's the process in a nutshell: The vast majority of spam is a basic message that gets sent to a large number of people. Everyone with Cloudmark's software has the option to mark an email as spam. When a message gets marked, Cloudmark reads this as a "vote" to label a message as spam. When a message gets enough "votes" Cloudmark's software gets updated and removes future occurrences of that message from everyone's mailbox. The genius of this is that Cloudmark only marks something as spam if several people have marked it. If you get a new business lead from an individual, there is no way that email can be flagged as spam by Cloudmark because it is a unique message. No one else has received the email other than you, so no one else could have marked it as spam. No more false positives!

Rules of Engagement - Part 4

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

4) No one thinks they are jerk. I want to write a book called “The extreme effort the human mind will put forth to deny wrongdoing” or “Hitler didn’t think he was an ass.” No one thinks they are an ass. No one thinks they are shifty or wrong. Sure maybe we’ll admit we’re wrong on small matters and the catch-all “nobody is perfect” clause, but we are very slow to admit our wrong doing on larger matters or matters of personal interest. It takes a lot of soul searching to honestly look at ourselves and bring our faults to the surface. We as humans will go to great lengths to justify our actions. We will do amazing mental acrobatics to justify our actions that we know are not right. Hitler thought mass genocide was a good thing. He never thought, hehehe, I’m an evil bastard bent on killing innocent men, women, and children. Obviously, we are not dealing with such large issues day to day...at least I hope not. But it’s the little things. It’s the way we come up with justifications for why “Bill” sucks at his job, when in actuality, it’s just that we don’t like him, we are jealous of him, or we don’t like something he believes in. We can’t fool ourselves into thinking we don’t do this. WE DO. Be aware of it. Just be honest with yourself. Just understand that you can fall into the trap of mental acrobatics to justify your stance or reasoning behind a decision. Just know that the truth may be that you are simply covering your butt and justifying your poor decision or poor conduct by projecting the problem onto someone else.

The flip side is to use this knowledge as a tool. There’s a reason behind everything. Here’s the scenario:
You and your coworker Bob have always been on good terms. It’s not like you hang out after work or anything, but he’s a good guy and you two get along fine. Then one day, Bob isn’t so nice. He short with you, calls out your mistakes at every opportunity, and generally makes the mood far from ideal. Why the change? It’s not because Bob picked up the “How to be an Evil Guy in 5 Easy Steps” book at Barnes and Noble the other day. The truth may be that you got the promotion that Bob secretly thought he should have had and now he treats you poorly. It’s not your fault. You didn’t know and you didn’t do anything to “take it” from Bob. Just know that there may be more going on than you are aware of and if you approach a personal problem from the standpoint of no one thinks they are a jerk, you will be more effective at getting to the heart of the problem. Put yourself in their shoes, try to “think like they do,” and know that no one thinks they are a jerk and you can often figure out why someone is behaving a certain way. You may not agree with it. It may not be “right.” But at least you are closer to the truth – or at least their “truth”. Once your have that understanding and insight, you don’t waste your time and energy on why is Bob suddenly being a jerk and how can I get back at him. You can get on to solving the problem and moving past interoffice misunderstandings. More importantly, you can honestly look at yourself and make sure you don’t become the one doing mental acrobatics to justify some poor actions.

The ups and downs of Flash

Even if you're on the web for a few minutes a week, you have undoubtedly seen a website (or part of a website) developed in flash. Adobe Flash is a very important part of a developer's toolkit these days. However, it's important to note its limitations.

One main limitation that Flash is that it is notorious for is updateability. Many Flash developers in the early days created a website that was strictly Flash, and many of them had to tell their clients how everything was now going to take twice as long and cost twice as much to make changes. And don't even think about having the client update the site themselves. Flash's development environment is more complex than a traditional HTML development environment (for example Adobe Dreamweaver). In Dreamweaver it takes about 4 clicks to insert a photo. With Flash it takes many more, and you also have to deal with organizational aspects of that image within the development environment itself. In short, there's just more you have to deal with when you insert a photo in Flash, not to mention every other aspect of development.

Another limitation (although I use the term "limitation" looser here) is programming. Flash uses a language called Actionscript. Actionscript is very powerful and also easy for a developer to learn since is similar to other languages. You can use Flash to connect to and update databases, and you can create some very powerful web applications with it. However, the Flash environment is based on a timeline. It gets very difficult and confusing to put pieces of code all over a timeline, and Flash can have many timelines in one file. This issue has been addressed in more recent versions of Flash, and it has helped. But it is still a persistant issue. I'm sure Adobe will work on this more in future versions.

So for now, what can you do with Flash? Currently, many developers treat Flash like a "component" in a website. It isn't the whole website, but a few pieces of it. Games, video, and animations, Flash when used correctly can add a lot of "punch" to a website.

Rules of Engagement - Part 3

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

3) Play to people’s strengths and minimize their weaknesses. It’s obvious to say that we are better at some things than others. That goes for personalities and the way people approach a problem or devise a solution. Just because it’s not the way you would do it, does not mean it’s wrong. For instance, some people are very analytical and like to evaluate the entire problem and come up with a definitive solution before they make a move. That’s a good thing, right? Yes and no. They are very prepared. They have accounted for almost any situation. No time was wasted once things are set in motion. Sounds good. However, by the time they have all their ducks in a row, quite often it’s too late. In the time it takes to account for all the variables, the variables will have changed. You never have all the information. At best, you’re lucky to have 80% of the information you need to make a good decision. If you spend all your time trying to gather that other 20%, the project will never get done. And then there’s the X-factor. You may account for every scenario you can think of…and then X happens. The analytical personality has a hard time dealing with this. They want to stop everything and re-evaluate. But when the X-factor hits, you don’t have that kind of time. You’ve got roll with the punches and make a call. You’ve got to take a risk and go with your gut. Analytical people HATE that.

Then there are the divers. People who just dive in with both feet and make changes, retool, and retweak as they go. This too, is both good and bad. These people are very “organic”. They can roll with the punches and flow through the problem. They adapt quickly. However, they run the risk of making poor decisions based on too little information. They also run the risk of changing directions many times in a process. They may end up in the same place as the analytical, but the team is worn out by the time they get there from all the direction changes. The team with the analytical is often frustrated, because they reach a point where they just want to stop planning and do something. The answer is somewhere in the middle. You need both and you need to at least acknowledge the “other side”. Understand their value. Focus on the good aspects and not the bad. Know that there is a time and a place for both and be willing, as hard as it might be to hand it off to the “other side” when the time is right. Who decides when the time is right? You both do. You are not going to change the way people think, feel or act. You may change their opinions on things, but you are not going to re-hardwire the way people think. Don’t try. Its takes along time, and even then, many would submit that it’s not possible. So don’t try. You sure aren’t going to do it in the span of a meeting. You are not getting paid to change the way someone’s mind works. So accept the difference and play to their strengths and downplay their weaknesses. Put analyticals in analytical roles and divers in diver roles. It sounds obvious, but people have a tendency to try and convert people to their way of working/thinking rather than playing to their strengths. It’s hard to admit, subconscious or not that someone else is better at something than you. And that’s what’s happening here. Many would say it’s not a case of someone being better. They would argue that the opposing way is wrong. Analyticals are too slow to move and scared to take a risk. Divers are random and have a short attention span. Both of these things are true. But if you let everyone play to their strengths you end up with this scenario:

• Divers explore new directions and ideas
• The divers hand off their ideas to the analyticals to add logistical concerns to the ideas
• Then get the divers come back in and help the anaylticals with X-factor scenarios
• The analyticals chew on those for a while and lay out a process for project completion
• The Divers, now armed with the guidelines for the project, implement the plan – rolling with the punches as they come.

The whole process is all about checks and balances, but there must be mutual respect. When the ball is in the divers court, the analyticals are quietly there to make sure the divers stay on track. The analyticals are not there shoot down the divers’ ideas. The analyticals are there to make sure the divers stay on track with the predefined goals of the project. When the ball is in the analyticals court, the divers are there to say “are you ready?, are you ready?, are you ready?” Not in an aggressive way, but with an excited push. The divers are also there to help the analyticals with the “outside the box” ideas (Lordy, I hate that overused term) and solutions to the analyticals logistical problems.

It’s not a fight. It’s not a contest. The fight is with the rival company. Focus on that.

Internet Marketing Strategy - Tech vs. Creative

There is a traditional battle in web design between the technical people and the creatives.

Tech – "What good is a website if no one finds it?"
Creative – "What good is being found if no one does anything with it?"

I tend to think of myself as a "creative" (although my background might speak to the contrary) and I'm usually an advocate for the creative aspects of web design: supporting the brand message, dedicating resources to interface design, and refining usability. Getting my "creative way" has often meant headaches for the technical folks and vice versa.

Back in 1996, many were of the opinion (myself included) that SEO (search engine optimization) was a fool's errand. The eyeball economy had not yet started. There was so little traffic in niche markets that it didn't seem worth the effort to compete in search engines. Conventional thinking was that you'd be better off with a compelling "destination" website, some traditional, proven marketing techniques, and fundamental SEO tactics rather than spending exorbitant resources competing for search results with no guarantee of any ROI. However, the web has changed a lot since then and we need a new web-marketing paradigm.

The amount of information accessible online today is incomprehensibly large. While this makes the Internet a fantastic resource, finding information can be daunting and being found online is extremely difficult. Enter SEO. The arguments traditionally made by programmers and technically-minded web developers carry more weight today. The reality of the modern congested webscape is that being found is 90% of the battle… maybe more.

Even though Google provides 600 trillion results, we know most folks typically don't go more than about 3 pages deep. So why bother? Because of these two modern realities:

1. The cut-off really IS that abrupt. Back in the day you could count on a few people to power through the first 10 or so pages of results looking for your site. Today content is more abundant as there are more sites offering up information and search engines are getting smarter. Today the top 30 results are actually close to relevant! So instead of having to sift through the first 10 -20 pages of nonsense, search engine users can actually find good information on the first few pages of results.
   


2. The payoff is huge! There are so many people out there using search to find so many things every day that the number of searches preformed, and the resulting number of clicks, visits, and purchases is so high that if you manage to get into the top 10 results the amount of business that this yields will likely be enormous (provided you haven't made any other gigantic web design/marketing errors).
   

So what does this mean? It means that SEO is no longer trivial. It's still a risk, but making it to the top of results has a huge pay off.

In short, getting found through search has practically become an all-or-nothing prospect. And the "all" is so big that even a website with terrible design will do well because even the small percentage of visitors that make it through the poor design will still be a large number.

Now don't think that SEO is a silver bullet. There can only be 10 sites in the top 10 and all of your competitors the world over want to be there just as badly as you do. SEO is less about a marketing strategy and more about trench warfare… with about a million trenches. Know what you're getting into and don’t think of it as a single ad or even a single campaign. SEO is a long, process of modifying, tweaking and monitoring. Search engine rules change and content is always king. It's nearly impossible to stay ahead of the curve. The trick is to keep up with it enough to surf.

Rules of Engagement - Part 2

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

2) Be productive or be quiet. No armchair quarterbacking. It’s really easy to say what the problems are. It’s much harder to come up with solutions. 95% of the people in the world will be more than happy to tell you what is wrong with a situation. 2.8% will have some type of knee-jerk solution to offer up short term fix to the problem. These tend to be short sided and biased toward whatever department the person with the idea works in. 2% will actually be trying to think of the big picture, but not willing to put forth the effort to really fox the problem. “A” for effort, but that’s about it. It’s only about .2% who are willing to actually put forth the effort to solve the problem and follow through to make sure it was a success. You are that .2%, like it or not. Take it seriously. Make some real change. This involves the dreaded words in business – “Take a chance” and “Do the work.” GASP! Too many companies today have a corporate culture of cover your butt and tow the line. No great innovation EVER comes from this mentality. The key is to not necessarily make huge quantum shifts. That’s too risky and too much to ask of most people. But making incremental and measurable change toward a quantum shift is fine. In the end, it’ll take longer, but it will minimize risk, keep everyone motivated, and it just makes good business sense.

Rules of Engagement - Part 1

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

Building off my last entry on Zen and the Art of Project Management, I got to thinking about meeting dynamics. Specifically - creative meetings. When I say creative meetings, I don’t just mean brainstorming sessions with the marketing department on the new ad campaign. I’m also talking about the kind of meetings where we evaluate the company’s past performance, latest progress, and forge a new business initiative. (You are doing that, right?) Some might wonder how this could be a “creative meeting.” It’s an analytical meeting where we evaluate hard metrics of past performance to spell out the future of the company. That is 100% true. However, if it’s a purely analytical venture, we end up simply repeating what we have done in the past to a greater or lesser degree. The conversation tends to stay in the realm of ‘sales were down last quarter, so we need to look at scaling back production for the short term and increasing sales initiatives in these key markets.’ This is not a bad thing. It makes good business sense. But it never innovates. If you include some creative types in the room, they tend to look at the data (in far less detail mind you) and come up with much bolder company moves. It was the creative thinkers in the conference room at Apple that brought that company back from the brink of bankruptcy. Why would a computer manufacturer make a high tech Walkman®?

“That’s not our core business.”

“We don’t do small consumer electronics.”

“It’ll dilute our brand.”

Now we have the iPod®. The best selling consumer electronic device on the planet.

It takes the creatives to think outside the normal business model and test the waters of the unknown. It takes the support of the analyticals to quickly and efficiently ground the creatives, so they aren’t expending a lot of time and money down an ill fated road. The analyticals also keep the core business moving ahead at a safe and steady pace. This allows the creatives to run ahead and try new things.

I was talking to a friend who works for Toyota corporate. He was saying the biggest difference between Toyota and Nissan is that Nissan is always trying to push the envelop. Nissan’s sales figures show that as well. It’s up and down like the Rocky mountains. Nissan has too many creatives in the room. Toyota on the other hand tended to have too many analyticals in the room. Their sales were always steady and growing, but very few people would say they bought a Toyota because it was a “cool car.” The Camry doesn’t really stand out in the crowd.

However, it appears that Toyota got a couple more creatives in the room with the advent of hybrid cars and the Scion line especially. Toyota got wise to the balance and executed it perfectly. They saw an untapped market of young new car owners who wanted inexpensive, cool cars. So Scion was born. It doesn’t say Scion, a Toyota subsidiary. They were smarter than that. Toyota let their creatives develop a new brand, with a small lineup to test the waters and try something that was historically not Toyota. They created a brand of cool, hip cars that are customizable and stand out from the crowd.

Bottom line, if you team up analytical thinkers with creative folks, you end up with a winning combination. But they have to balance each other out. Swinging too far in either direction can make the whole thing crumble.

You’ve got to let each group “do their thing.” The kicker is that these two groups tend to go in seemingly opposite directions and have a tendency to trip each other up as they go. Here’s where the Rules of Engagement come into play. Each group MUST respect the other and have trust in the other. If you set ground rules from the beginning and give each group just enough understanding of the other that there is some level of mutual respect, things go very nicely. You don’t have to “like” how the other does things, or agree with the way they go about it. You just need to know that they are doing their job and more importantly, IT”S NOT YOUR JOB. You stay focused on your portion and they’ll stay focused on theirs. When they overlap, it needs to be clearly defined whose opinion carries more weight. The Rules of Engagement, at their core, are a clear code of conduct. That way, poor personal behavior (which truly affects company growth) is pulled out of the realm of inter-office politics and into the realm of the bottom line.

The funny part about the Rules of Engagement is that even if you don’t believe what you are saying, simply obiding by the Rules of Engagement works. Everyone may know that you are not saying what you really think, but it doesn’t matter. It keeps the peace and your point was made; Maybe not to the degree that you wanted, but it was still made and you didn’t grind the meeting to a halt over your personal point. I’m not suggesting anyone lie. I’m just saying there is a big difference between “Sue, that’s a horrible idea” and “Sue, I see a lot of challenges that we would need to overcome to make that work, but we’ll look into it. Even if we can’t do what you are suggesting to it’s fullest, I can see some aspects that would be of benefit to the company now.” It may be something you feel really strongly about. Sue’s idea may sink the company in two days if it’s implemented. If it’s that bad, there are ways to express that, without pointing it at Sue. Focus on the issue, not the person.

Rules of engagement:

1) Leave your personal feelings at the door. Be objective. Don’t take criticism personally. On the flip side, be aware that you are talking to and potentially critiquing a person. Be constructive, be objective, but NEVER make it personal. Leave baggage, history, and excuses at the door. We’re here to fix the problem and improve the organization, not point fingers about why it didn’t work in the past. If you make it personal, you will single handedly kill that initiative before it starts. You’ll suck all the energy out of the room and the whole meeting will be wasted. Someone will try to salvage the meeting and try to move on. It won’t work. You might as well stop now and try again in two weeks...and it’ll be awkward then too. You’ll also strain relationships outside the conference room. This is the single fastest way to become the office jerk and be the person who kept the company from expanding. DON’T GO THERE.

More to come.

Adopting Technology vs. Understanding Technology

A while back I wrote about the gap in technology use that separates children from their parents. There are the usual jokes about how it defines who can program a VCR and who can send a txt message. When you grow up around technology you adopt it more easily. But there's a big difference between understanding how to use an interface that someone built for you (cell phones and video games) and understanding how the underlying technology works (DOS Prompts and TTL(Transistor-Transistor Logic)).

It's the same thing that happened to automobiles. There's less and less reason to look under the hood and there's less and less reason to troubleshoot your MP3 player or cell phone. This is not a bad thing. Your phone shouldn't crash. But as a result we have fewer opportunities to really understand the technology that we've become dependent on. So what happens when the technology fails and we've never looked under the hood before? Without understanding how something works, what chance do we have of fixing it?

Today, kids are exposed to branded, packaged technology and they are far better at using it than I am. This is a great thing. They get all the benefits of the technology but don't have to spend all the time I did to get things to work. No one wants to take a computer programming class just to record a TV show or dial a phone. There's too much life to live and too many other pursuits we need to follow. But there is a downside. When something is all packaged up, you rarely get a chance to see the "naked technology" behind it. As we become more isolated from the "naked technology" that does the work, we become more dependent on those that package the technology for us.

I'm certainly not advocating that we do away with modern conveniences or start programming our own cell phones. This is just a word of caution to be aware that as technology becomes more "prepared" we give up control over what we want the technology to do.

Zen and the Art of Project Management

After ten years in the design field, you learn a couple things. If I had to narrow down all my experience and pass on just one tidbit of knowledge, it would be the fact that in order for a project to succeed, you must focus more on the people involved than the timeline, budget, and project specifications. In order for a project to be successful, it takes everyone moving in the same direction. I know that sounds obvious. Everyone must be on the same page – have one voice – work as a unified group. We’ve heard it all before, but to say it is one thing; to do it is quite often a different matter. It’s often my job to bring together two things more opposite than oil and water. I have to make marketing and IT into chocolate and peanut butter. The two great tastes that taste great together. In order for a website to truly be successful, it needs good marketing to draw people in. It needs great content to keep them around and it needs great backend applications that allow the users to easily complete a transaction - be it purchasing an item, downloading content, or requesting more info. Whatever the end goal, that process must be seamless and intuitive to the user. That means that IT and marketing MUST work hand in hand. The user must not see where one department ends and another starts.

The reason it’s so difficult is because many people fail to understand the concept that other people think different than they do. Not “think differently” in regards to opinions on music or politics, but “think different.” Their brain is wired different. They approach a problem in a different manner. They bring a different set of life experiences to the table. They bring a different personality – which affects how they deal with a problem. All these things factored together spell out how a person’s brain functions.

The free spirited, live-life-as-it-comes person will approach a problem much differently than the calculating person who must have everything planned out. It seems obvious. But what people fail to realize is that not everyone thinks like they do. People today tend to view ‘different’ as a negative. We want everyone to be the same and the suggestion of ‘different’ is a slippery slope to ‘not equal’ which leads to ‘not as good as.’ Not true. It has nothing to do with talent which people often wrongly associate with self-worth. Well, we’re all different, so we are not equal and no, I’m not as good at some things as other people. So what. I’m no Tiger Woods on the golf course. Big deal. That doesn’t make less of a person. That doesn’t make me bad, I just suck at golf. But I can write code better than Tiger. This isn’t a case of who’s right and who’s wrong. Different can just be different. It’s just the understanding that people “think different” and therefore approach problems or challenged differently. One way may be better than another, but that does not negate all aspects of the lesser way.

If you ask a "creatively" inclined person what the name "Old El Paso Salsa" evokes emotionally, they'll easily give you an answer. It comes naturally to them. If you ask an "analytically" inclined person the same question, they'll simply blink at you in confusion (and probably think it's a foolish question). I'm not saying either group is better or worse. They are simply different. We need both. It's just a matter of recognizing the type of person and knowing what type of job to give them. Trying to force an analytical person into a creative role will only make them frustrated. Best case scenario, they "try and fix the problem" by applying methodologies that they understand to a foreign problem. You would end up with a micro managed brand name that explicitly and fully states what the product is in a very unimaginative and straightforward manner. You’d get "Farmers' Best International Fresh Mango Pineapple Salsa with Lime" and a tagline of "no preservatives". It says what the product is, but it doesn't evoke any reaction or emotion from the customer. You can’t blame the “analytical” thinker. They did their best. If you put someone in a role they are not suited for, they will fail. The person well suited for the job could have done it 5 times faster, cheaper, and easier. But we often do this in business. We plug people into roles they are not suited for and then wonder why the end product wasn’t so good. Put them in a role they are good at. Get them in there to ground everything the “creatives” are doing. They are there to make sure that the “creatives” are considering all the parameters of the project.

You need a combination of these things, but they must be balanced according to the criteria established by the project. There is a time and a place for each and the important thing is to know when and how much weight to put on everyone’s different role.

Put the “analytic” in the room during a “creative” brainstorm session and it’s a train wreck waiting to happen. The “creatives” are firing off ideas in the “safe” environment of a thought shower where no idea is a bad idea. If an “analytical” is there shooting down ideas as they come, the creativity will dry up faster than a noon-day sprinkle in the desert.

It’s simply a matter of knowing everyone’s strengths and what they bring to the table. Play to their strengths and know throughout the process how much weight to put on everyone’s opinion. In the brainstorming meeting the “analyticals'” opinion carries 2% weight. In the meeting where the “creatives’'” are presenting their ideas, the “analyticals'” opinion carries 85% weight. The conference room isn’t a missionary trip to convert the unfaithful to your way of thinking. So don’t try. It’s a mistake to think you can change the way someone thinks. You can change their opinion on a topic, but you can’t change how they think through a problem. Understand that and also have some insight into their approach, even if it doesn’t work for you. At least you know where they are coming from. It’s not about touchy-feely understanding how Bob really feels on the inside. It’s about getting the job done as saving some time. If you have a clue where Bob is coming from, you can disagree, but understand his thought process and move forward together to improve the idea – and no one feels insulted, disgruntled, or unmotivated.

The bottom line for success is to go with the flow. That is not to suggest being lax or flippant. But be open and patient. Understand that others have a different opinion and different way to solve a problem. Play to their strengths and don’t try and make them something they are not. We need to know when speak up and when to keep our mouths shut. We need to know our role in the company universe and know when our opinion matters and when it doesn’t. Yes, I said it. Sometimes our opinion doesn’t matter. Our point may be very valid – just not right now. It’s called a pen. Write it down and bring it up at the appropriate time. Because it’s truly about making the project a success and in order to do that, everyone must have ownership in it. To get respect, you have to give respect. To be heard, you must listen. Know you’re role and understand that sometimes it’s about you and sometimes it’s not…and that’s okay.

Blogging!

Oh the irony… I'm about to cause a total paradox… I'm going to blog about blogging. I'm sure I'm not the first person to do this, but if the people that access this blog are the people I hope they will be, namely my clients, I thought I'd go ahead and put together a short how-to on the subject.

Why Should I care? - Consider Blogging a marketing effort.
I'm sure you're no stranger to the idea of sending out a newsletter to remain top-of mind with your clients and prospects. Blogging is a natural extension of this. Now, many people try o send out newsletters via email. This is a very solid and sound tactic. Unfortunately, it's also a task that al too often gets put off, ignored, and as a result happens far less frequently as it should. This is one of blogging's biggest appeals. Blogging is a relatively coarse medium. There's no need for polish or refinement. It's a come-as you are medium. Just string together a few paragraphs to make a point and you're in business. The tools make it easy, and there's no danger of spamming.

But the big deal is this - People find websites via search engines, and search engines like text information. A great way to get found is by sharing information in a blog. You can provide your contact information right in the blog itself or link back to your website.

How do I get started? – You're already halfway there!
Well it's alarmingly easy, especially if you're already here. You can do as I did and head straight to www.blogger.com. Sign up for a free account, create a title for your blog, pick a design template and start typing. Presto-change-o! You're now a blogger!

Now blogger has it's share of critics and many people feel that www.wordpress.com is a superior product. I'm not as familiar with it, but blogger.com is completely free. It's a good place to get your feet wet in this world of real-time publishing. Good luck and let me know how it works for you!

Rackspace = Fantastic!

I though I'd write a few words about a company that makes me glad I'm in the web design business. Rackspace has been a truly extrordinary company to work with. The quality of their service has been outstanding. Every time I speak to someone there they are happy, up beat, knowledgable-- or have ready access to a person who knows the answers. While the quality of the ingredients (hardware, bandwith, etc.) is top of the line, what stands out is the quality and availability of the people.

That isn't to say that they have a team of all-knowing Internet gods on staff 24-7. I have been able to stump them a few times. (To be fair, these stumper questions were about email management software. Something that was not part of their offering and really doesn't pertain to hosting directly.)

I think the best part of their servce has been their complete willingness to either walk me through operations I was not familiar with or just take over the process and fix things to my specifications. Rackspace is the kind of company that stands for quality in the true meaning of the word and I'm very pleased to be doing business with them.

The Rise and Fall and Rise and Fall of image use on websites

Text Origins
For a long time the World Wide Web was composed primarily of text. HTML tags provided some basic formatting for paragraphs and relative font sizing. This first version of HTML was created by scientists and was not meant for exacting page layout.

The Rise
As the WWW started gaining popularity, more geeks (and I use the term endearingly) started to play with HTML. As a former scientist I can vouch for the fact that most of these guys don't have the greatest sense of esthetics. So as they started to get "creative" with design, the choices that were made could be called… questionable. This is how we ended up with cloud backgrounds, rainbow bars and animated GIFs of dancing cartoon animals.

The Fall
When the Internet started gaining popularity and widespread use in the mid 1990s, images were still rare and often of low quality. Digital cameras were just becoming available at low resolutions. File size was a real concern for web developers as 14.4 modems were the standard of the day. The first real web designers were faced with primitive tools and HTML was being pushed to its limits. Bandwidth restrictions made quality images a practical impossibility.

Of course this didn't stop people from using images. "Traditional" graphic designers created sites that relied heavily on images to get around the shortcomings of HTML. By using images, designers had complete control over typography and layout. The result was a slide show of still images. While these sites captured the designer's vision, they were very slow to load and were completely unusable to web surfers with accessibility needs (blind, etc.). There was also the gigantic repercussion these sites were almost completely invisible to search engines. Long load times and poor search engine performance has made this practice very rare.

The Rise
Once broadband Internet access began to permeate the market, giant images didn't seem like such a bad idea. Even video streams have become practical and expected over the Internet. While still largely invisible to search engines, image over use was no longer the bandwidth hog it had been. This has give rise to online photo services and photo sharing networks. This type of data exchange was unthinkable in 2000.

The Fall
Now, with the wide adoption of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) there is finally a chance to format page layout without resorting to images. CSS doesn't provide the level of font control most designers want but we are closer than ever before. Pages can be formatted rather beautifully using only CSS techniques. By adding just a few well chosen images and CSS layout techniques, an entire site can be given an esthetically appealing design with code alone.
As a web developer, I've spent many years mocking up designs in Photoshop and then translating those concepts into web pages. Often many key images would be sliced-out of these PSD files and incorporated into the HTML layout. Now with CSS, many of the things which had to be created with images (navigation rollovers for example) can be created with a few well chosen lines of CSS. While CSS isn't perfect, it has re-prioritized the way I approach design. I find myself looking to build as much of a layout as possible using CSS. It's amazing to see how much more you can accomplish (from a design perspective) building a website with just code than you could a few years ago.

I know the arrival of CSS is old news, but it recently struck me that the adoption of CSS has fundamentally changed the way we approach web layout. CSS has become so practical and well documented (including the hacks) that web layout is in the hands of programmers just as much as it is in the hands of web designers.

Noise in the Generational Technocracy Gap

I'm becoming more and more aware that degree of familiarity people have with technology (and by extension the ease with which they adopt it) has less to do with age or generation. It seems that the young and "techno savvy" people who are all about the very latest handheld devices are at a total loss when it comes to functions on a computer (PC or Mac). Also, there seem to be a number of "older" folks who manage to get through the latest gadgets and computer issues with graceful ease, thus defying the adage of the retiree that can't program a VCR.

So what does techno-savvy-ness correlate to if not generational exposure to technology? It's a mixture of logic and experience. Of course you see many bright people struggling to comprehend the basic operations of a cell phone-- but that's hardly surprising. I suppose the situation just strikes me as odd. It seems that more often it's the retirees that are out-pacing the kids at understanding and manipulating technology. Sure the kids know how to make their phones do neat things an how to play video games... but it's the people who were in the technological trenches-- the dark days of the DOS Prompt-- that understand what's going on inside the box, and how to fix it.

Tools and Software

I've been thinking about this for a while and the blogging format seems like a decent way to communicate this type of information. There are a number of software tools out there that make Internet life easier. Here are a few of the indispensable tools and practices.

1- Get rid of Norton System Works and AntiVirus:
A decade ago, Norton was indispensable, now it is a complete burden on your system that creates more problems than it solves and generally mucks up and slows down the operations of your computer.

2- Turn on Windows Firewall:
By this time, if you're a Windows user, you should be running WinXP. Use the native firewall. It's quite good and keeps life easy. For your frequent Internet access points (home and work) you should have a hardware firewall installed. This is far more secure and frees up system resources.

3- Keep your Anti-Virus software up to date:
If affordability is king, try AVG's Free Edition. It's been rated quite well, is frequently updated, and has all the features you could want including email scanning. - It's free so you don't have an excuse anymore.

4- Get Cloudmark:
While this isn't a free solution the Cloudmark Desktop is the best defense against SPAM that I've discovered. The software uses a common set of spam profiles submitted by other Cloudmark users. The only way a piece of email can be labeled as spam is if it has already been flagged as spam by other users. So if you're in the situation like myself where you rely on email for new business, you don't have to worry about email leads being flagged as spam. Only mass-delivered email will ever be flagged. This software is worth every penny!