My Cable Access Prediction Coming True

“A provision of a law passed by the [California] Legislature in 2006, which took effect Thursday, allows cable television providers the option of dropping their long-standing obligation of providing free studios, equipment and training to the public.” – Reed Johnson , LA Times

Three years ago, I wrote: “Add Cable Public Access to the Endangered Species List”

Personally, I’ve been a cable-free household for at least 5 years – and community access programming isn’t broadcast over the air (a much bigger issue – from my perspective). Thankfully, there are ways to receive my community-created media without purchasing a $100/mn Triple Play package….I can just load up MNstories or any number of reading lists in Cullect.

It feels ironic that as cable companies shed their obligations to support community access, the relevance and proliferation of community media is increasing. While the inverse is true of cable.

What Have You Deployed Today?

Some of you have been around web design long enough to remember the 4Ds (Discover, Plan, Design/Develop, and Deploy) that were so popular in agency marketing materials in the late 90s.

At the time, I once asked my CEO about them (he wrote the marketing copy)

“Well, we don’t do them on all the projects. Clients actually only care about the last one.”

Um.

So, the rest are for showing how unfamiliar with the client’s domain we are?

A while back, Jason Fried recounted those days:

“In 3 weeks we managed to tell them exactly what they already knew while also burning through 15% of the budget.”

blah.

He continues in the comments

“…you don’t really know if something is right until you do the real thing.” – Jason Fried

On my internal projects (the ones that lead to interesting clients), here’s my process

  1. Sketch out the primary screen on a 3×5 notecard.
  2. Draw out the database schema (I understand more about an app via its DB schema than a wireframe or UI).
  3. Build the smallest functioning app possible.
  4. Deploy. Public or not, deploying makes it real.
  5. Build the app better.
  6. Repeat 4-5 indefinitely.

Related:
Eating your own dog food

“We starting doing release cycles that were only a few hours apart, re-releasing every time we fixed a significant problem. ” – Andy Hertzfeld on making the original Macintosh OS.

“So. We all know we should ship early, ship often. That small, achievable goals are the best. That having something useful and publishable within a day or two or three trumps planning everything perfectly to the nth degree.” – Amy Hoy

Something Keeps Burning

Lots of chatter about the usefulness and relevance of FeedBurner since the Google acquisition 1. Chris Baskind formalizes it by updating the reasons not to use Feedburner to cache your feeds.

“FeedBurner is showing its age. While Google has ignored its new baby, technology has been steaming ahead.” – Chris Baskind

Baskind’s analysis is more publisher-oriented than my reader-oriented and parser-oriented issues with the service; Part 1, Part 2.

On the flip side, I give FeedBurner kudos for their focus and going deep on single, specific, simple, offering.

1. Hopefully, conventional wisdom about being acquired by Google will soon/now be equated to completely shutting a service down. AppEngine, if anything, is a thin lifeline to a not-customers of acquired services.

Putting the ‘mium’ in ‘Freemium’

For the past year, Cullect has been live wrapped in a subscription model based this “freemium” model I drew up back in the middle of 2006.

For Cullect, the benefit of this model have been obvious: even with a small number of paying customers – the servers are being paid for from subscription payments. For such a highly niche service with nearly no marketing effort – I’m declaring it a success.

On the Cashboard project I mentioned yesterday, I’m building toward a subscription model even more true to the above diagram. It seems like the right, most interesting, most challenging, and most sustainable, direction.

All the things that I expect to see from the other web apps launching in 2009.