End-troducing the Garrick Van Buren.com Forum

UPDATE: 19 Oct 2007, I’ve pulled the forum. Maybe it’ll come back later, but right now, it didn’t fit right.

WordPress’ comment threading aren’t the best place for support questions and ongoing discussion (just look at the comment thread for wp-ipodcatter). It’s too hard to see if someone has already asked your question and to see if it was answered.

With that in mind, I’ve installed bbPress, the bulletin board/discussion/forum software from the makers of WordPress. All ongoing discussion about the podcasts and plugin will be located in the Garrick Van Buren .com Forum.

The appropriate links have been added to the pages in question.

Rock on.

Yes, feel free to rant about me Behind my Back.

Anyone Know How to Read the Treo PhoneCallDB.pdb?

Before I got the Treo, I had a SonyEricsson that worked real nicely with BluePhoneElite and my PowerBook.

Sure, Caller ID and answering the phone from the laptop was nice, but what I really miss is the integration w/ iCal.

Since the Treo keeps a record of the phone calls and their duration and backs it up to my PowerBook on sync, it seems I could read the PhoneCallDB file and send the data to iCal using AppleScript.

Flixton Software’s Treo Call Log can read the file, but I can’t do anything with the data. So it doesn’t really help.

Anyone know where I can find some documentation on how to read PhoneCallDB.pdb so I can use the data?

Thanks.

And Now a Word From Our Party Chairperson

It’s no secret I consider interruption advertising a waste. Unfortunately, for so long, that’s the only way we’ve received commercial messages. Now, what if I mentioned where evol, peterme and ChrisFromETrade had dinner?

Thankfully, I don’t remember – some fantastic crepe place in the Mission district of SF. 😉

Phew, hopefully that little commercial message (or 4) will keep the socialists away while keeping my uplifter cred.

On a related note, is this an ad for Kinkos?

Distribution is Marketing

When we podcast the 2005 MIMA Summit – someone suggested we restrict access to the recordings. They’d be correct if the value of the conference was in the sessions. It’s not.

The value is in the hallway conversations, the handshakes, business card exchanges, and direct personal interactions. The sessions themselves are strictly the focal point, the common conversation piece, the marketing.

Every session ITConversations distributes is marketing for them, the conference, and the speaker.

Mark Cuban talks about the same phenomenon in the movies and television:

“It wasn’t that long ago that some people in the sports business thought that having games on TV would reduce attendance. After all, why go to the game when you can watch it for free on TV? Then someone decided to do some research and as it turns out, the more games you broadcast on TV, the more people who go to your games.”

This is also why the most effective use of ad dollars is in product development.

Update 21 January 2006:

“…a downloaded file is not a lost sale it’s a gained fan…” – Joichi Ito

We Need to Build More Parks Not More Prisons

Smarter people than I can debate the title of this post literally, I’m using it as a metaphor for web development and customer relationships overall.

Vendors don’t have full control over their customers. Never did. Best they can do is encourage, support, and remove obstacles impeding their customers’ success. Especially if the vendor wants to build any notion of community among their customers.

This is where the metaphor comes in.

Each business needs to be an ecosystem where customers are free (free to move to a different vendor, free to congregate) rather than locked-in or “allowed to”. The same reason file formats should be plain text, xml, or another standard format, is the same reason DRM is a bad idea – it’s not usable if the vendor disappears.

The next question is whether we build one big park or a system of smaller ones. Personally, I’m a fan of the system (if I wasn’t I wouldn’t publish regularly to multiple blogs). It allows focus and gives you the power to say, “No, We don’t do that here – we do it over there.”

In the end, best we can hope for is customers leave the place better than they found it.

Update 21 January 2006:

“…you don’t try to force a behavior change, you look for a behavior change and try to make products for it…” – Joichi Ito

A Proposal for a TiVo, iTunes, Podcast Ad Formats

30 seconds is way too long. On the TiVo, we’re fast-forwarding through the commercials and other boring bits. We’re still watching as we fast-forward (we get the brand-impression, just more quickly and without sound).

Same with podcasts. As I’ve mentioned earlier, we’re not skipping the ads, just getting through them more quickly. I know one of the podcasts I listen to is sponsored by Earthlink. The host mentions it the moment before I start fast-forwarding. I don’t need to hear Earthlink themselves waste my time – the host already told me everything I need to know. Using 3 words – “sponsored by Earthlink”.

Likewise, television advertisers need to embraces the fast-forward and create media entertaining at both speeds. Something akin to the Levi’s ads from the 80s – a big logo taking up most of the screen surrounded by entertaining animations. This would scale to smaller video devices like the iPod, PSP, and Archos while giving TiVo viewers a reason to replay.

Good Prototypes Remove Everything Else

Back in ’97 I spent some time at a Shockwave game boutique (didn’t we all). One day, a technology vendor sent over a prototype game – highlighting a new interaction model.

The game was obviously a prototype but we weren’t sure of what. All the elements on-screen very simple shapes and a random color (is that what we’re looking at?). The controller worked a little differently than we expected – is that the prototype? Unsure and unimpressed, we put the game aside and went back to work. Later that day, the vendor came by and explained the magic. Just like how an explanation deflates the funniest joke. The moment had past.

Fast forward a couple years and I’m working on the information architecture for a very large site redesign. We were hashing through hundreds of wireframes (paper prototypes) a month, each time a section of the page was signed-off on, it was removed from the wireframes and replaced with a box and a ‘see page ## for details’. The page header, footer, side nav, and many other sections were all treated this way. Unlike the game I described earlier, this removal of detail allowed us to focus the conversation and the prototype on the unknowns, while setting context and telling a story.

Otherwise, Seth Godin is right – the smart people, won’t get it. They won’t get it because they won’t know what they’re looking at. Black & white can tell a very good story without being close to the finish of the final product.

From my perspective, a protoype is rarely about the thing. It’s about having a focal point for a conversation, and the conversation should always change the prototype.