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Post by Nicole Fabian-Weber

Tucked away in the corner of my dresser is a little bracelet that reads, "WWSSD." Translation: "What Would Sammi Sweetheart Do?" It sits next to my jewelry box, because, each morning, when I'm putting the finishing touches on my outfit -- aka, m'bling -- I wonder, "How would Sammi complete this look? Would she go cantaloupe-size hoop earrings in gold, or cantaloupe-size hoop earrings in silver?" Decisions, decisions.

So, you bet your ass I was excited as all get-out when I heard that homegirl was now not only a hair extension artisan, she's a jewelry designer for RichRocks, too. Neil Lane, watch out! I mean, what says elegance and class more than a woman in a Juicy sweatsuit, a French manicure, and a bedroom that was trashed by her boyfriend? Me likey the Sammi jewels.

What about her other castmates, though? Sure, Snooki has a best-selling book, and The Situation has a workout video, but they're all such fashion icons -- I think they each need to come out with some stylish crap.

What would they all create? I mean, we know what Sammi and Pauly D. would come out with (hair gel), but if given carte blanche to make their mark on the fashion and beauty world, what would they do? Oh, look at that, I'm in front of a keyboard right now. Why don't I make some fun speculations.

Snooki: Her own thong line. Think about it. You're getting ready for a big business meeting, and you're feeling all stuffy in your stupid business suit. You want something kind of fun underneath, something playful, something Snooki. Slip on a neon green Snooki thong and everything will be A-Okay.

Ronnie: A faux fur coat line. 'Cause dude is a pimp! Remember when he made out with two girls at once in Miami when Sammi was home sleeping. Baller.

JWoww: Her own brand of lip gloss. For your boobs. Why not, right? Anything JWoww does revolves around boobs. She could branch off into boob eyeliner, boob mascara, maybe even boob foundation.

The Situation: Two words: Sports bras. Oh, like you've never thought of that! How dope would it be to strap on a Sitch by Situation (which he totally took from She by Sheree) sports bra before you do your thing on the treadmill. It would provide great support. Because he likes holding the boobies.

Vinny: An eyeglass line. It's kind of hard to think of something silly and crazy for Vinny because he's actually kind of normal, so eyeglasses? No, how about prescription sunglasses? So, you can look cool and still be able to see. Boom!

What do you think of Sammi Sweetheart's jewelry line? What other items could the cast come out with?

 

Image via Astrid Stawiarz/Getty

On Tuesday we got together with six companies who are product authors to look at “The impact of cloud computing as a disruptive technology for product development” (see details)

We looked at questions such as:

• Is it really radically different?
• Is it really about SaaS not Cloud?
• What are the advantages? For you? For your customers?
• What are the disadvantages? For you? For your customers?
• What does it mean to your business? How you sell? How you support? How you compete?
• What new opportunities does it create?
• What more can Microsoft do to help?

A big thank you to all the folks who attended. I wanted to briefly share some links that we discussed during the workshop + the very top level observations – and I will follow up at a later date with some of the detail.

Observations

Cloud is the future: What caught me out slightly was the massive agreement in the workshop that developing for the cloud (or to be more specific, developing applications that no longer were deployed on-premise) was the future – even if it was hard to get there from the starting point (e.g. rich client on-premise applications in older tech). All felt this would become the dominant model.

Windows Azure Platform pricing remains a concern: This is primarily at the low end – provisioning out applications for use by potentially one person within an org. This is really about the need to be highly multi tenanted in the solution on top of Azure – but that requires significant work sometimes.

Other PaaS solutions considered “slicker” than Azure: Azure development/deployment model isn’t as rapid as others. Heroku and AppHarbor being used as examples. Observation was also made that some of these companies are tiny (e.g. AppHarbor) and therefore their long term future is unknown.

Azure roadmap is missing/hard to find: Plenty of agreement that it was hard to understand/find the roadmap for the Windows Azure Platform. Yet vitally important to have this given a) rate of change and b) missing features.

Single tenant to Multi tenant isn’t hard: This is at odds with my own experiences but the room felt overall that the work was relatively straight forward.

PaaS has too many players right now: And the concern is about who will be “left at the end”. General agreement was Azure would be. Interestingly vendor lock in was not seen as a concern – but choosing who to “lock in” with was important to get right.

Future Pricing from PaaS providers: Much of the initial concerns were addressed – but concern about the increasing cost of energy remained. The observation that the increases would need to be passed from the provider to the product author to the consumer vs in the past where the consumer would have handled direct.

Maintaining Relationships with customers/getting feedback: Good discussion on the need to change significantly to ensure that a company now delivering its products through the cloud can still deliver the products its customers want.

Resist the temptation to become a “self hoster”: Write the app and let someone else be the PaaS provider. Do not attempt to become your own PaaS provider. The analogy was made with ISVs in the 90s who used to write their own databases rather than use Oracles or SQL.

Partnering with Microsoft: Can be very difficult for small companies. Help!

Links

• Connect with the team http://bit.ly/ukisvfirststop

• Bookmark the team blog to get the latest ISV specific information from the team
• http://blogs.msdn.com/ukisvdev
• Join the LinkedIn Group to interact with the team and your peers
• http://bit.ly/ukisvdevgroup
• Follow the team twitter to get late breaking news around events and more
• http://twitter.com/ukisvdev
• Tell us what you are up to with technology to help shape how we help and unlock benefits
• http://bit.ly/ukmprhome

• Lots of the charts we looked at during the workshop

• Economics of the Cloud Whitepaper

• Learning
  • http://player.microsoftpdc.com/
  • http://www.msdev.com has great Azure content in bite size chunks
• SaaS
  • Microsoft S+S/SaaS info dating from 2007.
  • New example application on SaaS and Windows Azure Fabrikam Shipping
• Getting a subscription/getting started
  • http://www.azure.com/offers and activate your Azure benefit in MSDN
  • Use getting started resources http://azure.com/getstarted

Content is not something that you should be scared of.

Ever since we first picked up a crayon as a child, we've been creating content. Sure, we didn't care about the ROI of coloring pages or the SEO of finger painting. We created because it was fun and we enjoyed doing it. Somewhere along the way, too many of us forgot this.

Ever since my book "Content Rules" hit store shelves, I've found myself talking about how to create content more than ever. People hope and pray for a silver bullet solution to the "mystery" of a content strategy, and while I'm here to tell you that there isn't one, I do want to give you tools to get started immediately.

I want to take my time this month to give you the basic steps that you can do this week during your lunch hour to begin embracing and using content in your company.

I don't care if you are a church looking for new parishioners, a singer-songwriter looking for more fans, or a small business looking to sell more widgets. Over the next five days with only an hour a day you can get started. Where you go from there is up to you.

Yes, this is only the beginning, but every journey begins with a single step.

Day 1: Take a content inventory
Talk to the other people in your company about anything they have that might be able to be leveraged as content moving forward. Every company I've ever walked through this exercise always finds something they can use. Don't worry about how you are going to use this content at the time, but rather focus on finding out what you have and making a list of it all.

I want you to start here because unless you are just starting up your business, you've got assets of some sort that we can start with even if you are not thinking of them as content right now.

Places that content might be hiding:

• If you have ever had a booth at a trade show or conference, you must have created brochures, video demos, or have some left over swag that you were giving away.
  
  
• Your marketing or sales departments must have slide decks that they work from on a regular basis.
  
  
• If your executives or other staff members speak at events or in the office there may be a video of it.
  
  
• Intranets and shared file servers often have more than you'd imagine on them. Click around and you never know what you might find lurking.

Now I can't say if you'll find coal or diamonds; but you've got to start with something and so an inventory of what you already have is a critical starting point. Then, examine what you turned up, and start thinking of ways you can reimagine that content and share it with others.

Day 2:  Check out what others are doing
There is no better way to determine the type of content you want to create then to look at what others are creating. This can serve, as both research and inspiration, so don't write it off as a waste of time.

If you are not sure where to look, start on your competitors' websites. Look at what they are creating and sharing with their customers. This is also important because it sets a benchmark for where you are right now, and often you may discover that you are not as behind as you might have thought. Take specific notes on what media they are creating for, and where they are sharing their content. If they are sharing on a particular platform, than it's more than likely you want to be there as well.

Also, go out to your personal Facebook and Twitter accounts and see what your friends are sharing and commenting on. While this may not represent how your customers will share and react, it will help you appreciate more how people share content they find interesting. Understanding these behaviors will increase your chances of creating engaging content.

Day 3:  Establish your footprint
One of the rules in my book is to "create wings and roots," and what you'll be doing today is setting up the roots for where your content will live.

Now, if you are a small company or have an IT department that is ok with you experimenting, this may mean setting up WordPress or another blogging platform on your servers. But, what I'm really hoping for is that you'll go out and set up accounts on the major social media networks. At a minimum, you should have accounts on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Flickr. Now, I don't know if you'll be actively using these in the future, but having them established is never a bad idea so go ahead and get them.

The goal is to set them up, but also to poke around and see what you can do on each. Most allow you to hide your actions so you can play in peace. Yesterday, you looked at your competition and more than likely asked a couple of times, "How did they do that?" See if you can find the answers as you investigate each platform.

Keep in mind that today isn't about making your Facebook page perfect or uploading a batch of photos. It is really about getting to know the technologies better. It is critical that you understand what can and can't be done on each platform so that you can use them to the fullest when the time comes.

Day 4:Walk and daydream
How many of you just read that and softly screamed, "What?"

At this point you've spent enough time in front of your computer, and it is time to get away from the office for a bit so that you can think with a clear head. Want to be really successful? Leave the phone and any other devices at the office when you leave.

Take a notebook (the old fashion paper kind) and get out of the office. Now that you've seen what others are doing and have looked at where you might be putting content, I want you to focus today on thinking about the kinds of content you'd love to create.

Do not let important things like resources, time, and budget get in the way of your brainstorming because there are always ways to get around those later. Right now, if you had no constraints, what would you love to create?

As you come up with ideas, write them down. Be as specific or generic as you want. Not sure where to start, or need a nudge in the right direction? Try some of these questions on for size:

• If I could show only one aspect of my product, what it would be?
• What 10 things questions do my customers always ask us?
• Wouldn't it be great if our customers knew ______ about us?
• What did you notice that your competition was lacking in?

Don't over-think this walk, because the goal is to have a laundry list of possible content topics. You'll have plenty of time to flush them out in more detail, but hopefully at least one on your list seems like it would be an easy one to write a post about or film a quick video about.

Save this list because you now have the starting point of an editorial calendar, and the content to fill it with.

Day 5: Create!
It is now Friday and the end of the week, so it's time to have some fun and put all those previous lunch hours to the test. It is time for you to stop thinking about doing it and actually create a piece of content.

Take one of those ideas that stood out to you yesterday and create a single piece of content around it. I'm not sure if you are more comfortable with photography, video, or writing, but pick a medium and don't over-think it. Just create it and don't focus on trying to get it right -- focus on getting it done.

Once you've written your blog post or filmed your video, go back and look at it to determine how you can make it better. Remember that if this is your first time, it will not be perfect. We all start somewhere and get better as we repeat the process. Our parents were right when they told us practice makes perfect.

Feeling good about what you created? Now work with the powers that be and publish it so others can see it. Remember those roots you created on Day 3? Now you can plant them and let them grow.

I'm not trying to make light of how much work it can take to develop and execute a successful content strategy, but I also want to show you that anyone can get started today, and that instead of putting it off, you can start creating content in a week's time.

You can walk through this exercise by yourself or you can have your department go through it with you to see what emerges from the group effort. You never know, you could be on the journey to making your content rule before you know it. Safe travels!

C.C. Chapman is the author of "Content Rules" and the founder of Digital Dads. 

On Twitter? Follow C.C. at @cc_chapman.  Follow iMediaConnection at @iMediaTweet.

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Let’s face it.  With over one million nonprofits in the US, we have competition.  That’s why we have to do a good job explaining how we’re different from organizations that seem similar.  This isn’t just beneficial to your organization; it’s best for the common good.  Competition spurs us to do better, to work more effectively, and to use our limited resources more wisely.  It avoids duplication of effort and allows donors to focus resources on the best groups to fulfill their goals.  Competitive thinking makes us more successful in our missions, and that improvement in turn makes the world a better place.

Yay competition!

So how do you compete? Here are four dimensions for thinking about differentiation:

1. Strength: What is your strong suit, or what strength can you create? Are you especially good at building relationships with your constituents? Do you have very good services or an innovative approach to tackling your issue?

2. Difference: What makes you unique? Do you have the most stellar reputation in your field? Are you the biggest, or the first to offer a service? Are your services more accessible than those of your competitors? Is your overhead lower than that of other groups?

3. Simplicity: Is your strength or difference a simple, easily grasped concept? At best, you can stand for just one attribute in each audience’s mind, so make that quality clear and memorable.

4. Value to audience: Last, check yourself. Is the quality you’ve chosen something that your audiences actually care about? The competitive advantage you cite is not an advantage if it’s irrelevant or uninteresting to the people you want to reach.

Sound scary?  Well it’s not, but it’s critically important in spurring cloud adoption in your organisation and therefore a set of key skills for IT Professionals.  We have a technology toolset called Active Directory Federation Service (ADFS 2.0) that uses a set of secure protocols like SSL and Public Key encryption to provide Single Sign On to applications that are not hosted inside your network.  It doesn’t even require a physical connection between your Active Directory Directory Service (AD DS) and the application, or even for you to dangle your AD DS on the internet like tasty shark bait.  In fact you don’t even have to place your AD DS into a DMZ.  All this means you can provide secure single sign on…but why would you and how do you?  (hint the how is at the bottom).

Lets take a look why.  What are the applications that your users use most frequently and easily?  Probably Word, Excel, PowerPoint…then probably some line of business apps (LOB).  How do people sign onto those LOB apps?  If you’re in a good place then they don’t need to, they just launch the app and get signed in automatically but if you aren’t then they probably need extra user names and passwords.  How many helpdesk calls does that create?  What perception of IT services in your organisation does that create?  I know, I’ve been there….the answer is usually lots of calls, poor perception.  That user experience can be better with simple AD authentication for the application.

The pain not having single sign on with a cloud application can be extreme.  Imagine this scenario:

But with ADFS 2.0 in place all that has to happen is that the user remembers their Windows password and logs in.  Just once and it’s far more secure because your organisation is in charge of the password reset policy, the complexity policy and most importantly – because they don’t have to remember lots of passwords they stop writing them down on their desks.

We’re pretty serious about this being a major piece of the cloud for the IT Professional, so much so that both @deepfat and I took two days out a week or so ago for offsite training on how to build ADFS 2.0 infrastructures.  It’s not all that complex either…once you have an understanding of PKI.  But to make it even easier you’ll find whitepapers that take a step by step approach to the technology just here: Single Sign-On from Active Directory to a Windows Azure Application Whitepaper .  Not only is this essential for Azure it’s also essential to know for the best possible Office365 integration.

Detroit has been bankrupt for years. It simply refuses to admit it. Detroit's schools are bankrupt as well. A mere 25% of students graduate from high school.

Yet, in spite of hints and threats from mayors and budget commissions, and in spite of common sense talk of bankruptcy, Detroit has not pulled the bankruptcy trigger.

In a futile attempt to stave off the inevitable one last time, Mayor Bing's latest plan is to cutoff city services including road repairs, police patrols, street lights, and garbage collection in 20% of Detroit.

Bing to Cede 20% of Detroit to Gangs and Homeless

City officials suggest this will not shrink the size of the city. Perhaps it won't shrink Detroit on Google Maps. However, Bing's plan would effectively surrender 20% of the city to gangs and the homeless.

Would you want to live in one of the gang war-zones that his plan would create? Would you want to live in a bordering neighborhood or in a bordering city?

Regardless of your answer, Bing's plan cannot and will not work and I believe Detroit will, sometime in 2011, file for bankruptcy. If so, expect massive turmoil in municipal bonds.

Less Than a Full-Service City

The Wall Street Journal discusses Bing's plan in Less Than a Full-Service City

More than 20% of Detroit's 139 square miles could go without key municipal services under a new plan being developed for the city, with as few as seven neighborhoods seen as meriting the city's full resources.

Those details, outlined by Detroit planning officials this week, offer the clearest picture yet of how Mayor Dave Bing intends to execute what has become his signature program: reconfiguring Detroit to reflect its declining population and fiscal health. Yet the blueprint still leaves large legal and financial questions unresolved.

Mr. Bing's staff wants to concentrate Detroit's remaining population—expected to be less than 900,000 after this year's Census count—and limited local, state and federal dollars in the most viable swaths of the city, while other sectors could go without such services as garbage pickup, police patrols, road repair and street lights.

Karla Henderson, a city planning official leading the mayor's campaign, said in an interview Thursday that her staff had deemed just seven to nine sections of Detroit worthy of receiving the city's full resources. She declined to identify the areas, but said the final plan could include a greater number.

"What we have found is that even some of our stronger neighborhoods are at a tipping point with vacancy," Ms. Henderson said. "Vacancy adds to blight and blight is a disease that takes over the whole neighborhood. So the sooner we can get those homes occupied, the better for the city."

Officials bristle when their efforts are described as downsizing, saying their aim is to repurpose portions of the city, not redraw its borders. "We will not be shrinking the city," Ms. Henderson said. "We are 139 [square] miles and we'll stay that way."

Repurpose or Abandon?

Of course the Mayor's office did not say they would abandon sections of the city to gangs. But how the hell can repurposing as described above possibly mean anything else?

What's next? Barbed wire? Oh wait a minute, Detroit already has tried that. Razor-wire too. Here's a picture of Detroit's clearly abandoned repurposed Michigan Central Train Depot.

Image courtesy of the Journal and the AP.

Detroit's Tax Collection Process

The Detroit Free Press points out Detroit botched Packard plant tax collection

The City of Detroit has failed for nearly four years to send property tax bills to the owner of the Packard plant, costing the city badly needed cash.

At 3.5 million square feet, the plant is by far the largest derelict property in Detroit.

It wasn't until the Free Press began making inquiries last week that the city's assessor's office returned the property to the tax rolls -- with an assessed value of nearly $1.6 million. The change came nearly four years after a Michigan Supreme Court decision prompted the city to surrender the century-old plant to Bioresource, a company whose last listed corporate representative is a convicted drug dealer.

Last week, less than 18 hours after a reporter questioned why the property was listed as city-owned, the assessor's office changed its status to "taxable." The property's assessed value ballooned from almost nothing to nearly $1.6 million.

Robin Boyle, professor of urban planning at Wayne State University, said the error underscores "just how challenged the city is in dealing with the fundamental task of title, control, oversight and follow-through" with property throughout the city.

"To me, that is a fundamental problem that leaves Detroit in a consistently weakened position. It can't even do the basics," Boyle said. "This is a huge piece of real estate, and yet, there's still confusion."

Although only one tenant remains on the property, the plant is not entirely neglected. Scrappers prowl it for metal. Graffiti artists decorate its walls. Someone perched TV sets atop pillars standing at least 15 feet tall.

And it can all be yours for $13 million.

David Wax, senior associate with Burger Easton & Co. in Farmington Hills, has listed the property for sale for a couple of years. He said there was a good deal of interest before the world economic crisis and before steel prices collapsed, making the Packard plant less attractive to buy and then demolish for its metal.

"For 13 years it's been vandalized, raped, burned, stripped of anything of value," Wax said. And on any given day, he said, you can hear "people with hammers and cutting torches cutting steel out of the building."

Packard Closeup Images

The Business Insider has fantastic set of images of the beautiful $13 million Packard property. Here are a couple of those images.

Now that the building has been put back on the active tax rolls to a convicted drug dealer, this is the sequence of events I imagine would transpire were Detroit to stay on its existing path using Bing's plan as the roadmap.

1. Detroit will send a tax bill to Bioresource
2. Bioresourse will not pay the bill
3. Detroit will reacquire the building in a tax sale with no bidders
4. In a couple of years Detroit will realize it once again owns the building
5. Detroit will repurpose the Packard plant with the same success as depicted in the Michigan Central Train Depot image.

Detroit Schools Bankrupt

Flashback July 24,2009: The Wall Street Journal reports Detroit’s Schools Are Going Bankrupt, Too

Now’s the time to cast off collective bargaining agreements and introduce school choice.

‘Am I optimistic that they can avoid it . . . ? I am not.” That’s what retired judge Ray Graves said this week when asked whether the Detroit public schools, which he is advising, would be forced into bankruptcy. Facing violence, a shrinking student body, and graduating just one out of every four students who enter the ninth grade on time, the city’s schools have been stumbling for years. Now they face a seemingly insurmountable deficit and are expected to file for bankruptcy protection at about the time that students should be settling down in a new school year.

As embarrassing as such a filing would be, it also may be the only thing that can force the kinds of changes Detroit schools need—as the financial turmoil is just the latest manifestation of a system in terminal decline.

Detroit is like many urban school districts—large, unwieldy and bureaucratic, with a powerful union that makes the system unable to adapt to changing circumstances and that until very recently had an indulgent political class that insulated it from reform. That insulation came in two forms. The first was neglect. Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick spent several years distracted by a scandal stemming from his affair with a staffer. He resigned last year, pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice, and was sentenced to four months in jail. Had he been an effective mayor, he might have also been a powerful advocate for students.

The other insulating force was a conscious decision to wall off Detroit from charter schools. In 1993, Michigan’s legislature made it difficult to create new charters in Detroit by declaring that only community colleges could authorize charters for primary and secondary schools in “First-Class Districts”—defined as those with more than 100,000 students. Detroit was the only First-Class District. In 2003 the state, under pressure from the Detroit Federation of Teachers, turned down a gift of $200 million from philanthropist Robert Thompson that would have established 15 charter schools in the city. Those charters are needed today.

The net result has been a school system that’s been coming apart as the teachers union has dug in its heels. In 2006, the union illegally went on strike, killing a plan to force teachers to take a pay cut to balance the system’s books.

Collective Bargaining has Morally and Fiscally Bankrupted Detroit Schools

Read that again. Under pressure from the Teachers' Union, Detroit turned down $200 Million. That was in 2003 dollars. Wow. No doubt the union "did it for the kids".

For more on the appalling behavior of Detroit's teachers' unions please see Detroit Public Schools (25% graduation rate) teachers unions opposing highly qualified volunteer teachers.

It is time to kill collective bargaining for public unions, every one of them, and nation-wide, not just Detroit.

Detroit Bankruptcy Looms

Flashback April 6, 2010: Detroit Bankruptcy Looms with Deficit of $446 Million in Budget of $1.6 Billion

Detroit has hit the end of the line. It's budget deficit is between $446 million and $466 million (28% to 29%) of $1.6 billion with few ways other than drastic cuts in wages and benefits to address the problem.

If unions will not give in (and they won't), Detroit Faces Bankruptcy.

With that introduction, inquiring minds are diving into the Citizens Research Council report on The Fiscal Condition of the City of Detroit

The Economic Base

The deterioration of the economic base of the city has accelerated. There were an estimated 81,754 vacant housing units (22.2 percent of the total) in Detroit before the recession; that number increased to an estimated 101,737 (27.8 percent of the total) in 2008.

The average price of a residential unit sold in the January through November, 2009 period was $12,439, down from $97,847 in 2003. Remaining businesses and individuals are challenging property tax assessments on parcels that have lost value and, in some cases, cannot be sold at any price.

More than half of employed city residents work outside the city limits; the metro area has the highest unemployment rate of the 100 major metro areas in the U.S.

Detroit Should Embrace Bankruptcy

The only legitimate solution for Detroit is to shed pension obligations, privatize everything it can including the fire department, and dump unions contracts en masse. Since those items can only happen in restructuring, Detroit should openly embrace bankruptcy.

Detroit Warns of Bankruptcy as It Prepares Bond Sale

Flashback March 5, 2010: Detroit Warns of Bankruptcy as It Prepares Bond Sale

Detroit, the largest U.S. city whose debt is rated below investment grade, warned investors of the risk of bankruptcy as it prepares to sell $250 million of bonds to help close its budget deficit.

The city told bondholders in a March 2 preliminary offering statement that while it hasn’t taken steps to reorganize under Chapter 9, it may have few other options if its financial condition worsens. Detroit officials also detailed the steps they would have to take should bankruptcy become necessary.

“If the city’s financial status were to deteriorate further the city’s options to improve its fiscal health may be limited,” Detroit said in the statement. Bondholders “should not expect that their rights to payment and remedies will not be adversely affected by filing under the bankruptcy code.”

“We are still in a financial crisis but insolvency isn’t on the horizon or on the agenda at this time,” Mayor Dave Bing said in an e-mail from his spokesman, Dan Lijana. The total deficit this year is estimated at $280 million.

Bing Still Pretends - How Long Can It Last?

For reasons unknown, Bing just cannot do what is right. He will not come flat out and say what everyone in their right mind knows - that Detroit is fiscally and morally bankrupt and so are its schools.

Instead, on December 10, 2010 Detroit Borrows $100 Million for Police and Fire Headquarters.

Detroit, whose population has dropped by half since 1950, borrowed $100 million to turn the MGM Grand Casino’s former site into a headquarters for the police, fire and emergency-services departments.

The city sold so-called Recovery Zone Bonds authorized under the U.S. economic-stimulus plan, borrowing at 4.55 percent, the city said in a press release today. The bonds, with the longest term maturing in 2035, were sold through the Michigan Finance Authority by investment banks led by Siebert Brandford Shank & Co., according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

“The financial markets believe in what we’re doing to bring fiscal responsibility back to Detroit,” said Mayor Dave Bing, in a prepared statement today.

So-called recovery zone bonds were included in the economic-stimulus package signed by President Barack Obama last year to help expand the economy of areas with poverty and unemployment. They’re a type of Build America Bond that comes with a 45 percent interest subsidy rather than 35 percent rate under the Build America program, which expires Dec. 31.

The bonds were rated A1, or fifth highest, by Moody’s Investor’s Service and AA-, or fourth highest, by Standard & Poor’s.

BABs Set to End December 31, 2010

Note the ridiculous rating of those bonds by Moody's and by Standard & Poor’s. If the Federal government is backing those bonds, then they are AAA. If not, they are junk. There is no in-between.

Thankfully, the extremely ridiculous Build-America-Bond program will expire on December 31. When it does, no one in their right mind will lend Detroit money, and that at long-last will mean "lights out" for Detroit.

A new Republican governor takes over in Michigan next year, complete with a new Republican legislature. I believe Governor-Elect Rick Snyder will be amenable to fixing what ails Detroit and numerous other cities in Michigan.

Should Mayor Bing not seek bankruptcy assistance, I propose for Governor Snyder to force Detroit into bankruptcy. It is the only hope Detroit has. Mayor Bing is clearly in over his head.

Governor Snyder would be a hero if he can turn Detroit around, and outside of bankruptcy that appears impossible.

Thus, forced or not, I believe Detroit will file bankruptcy in 2011, the state will accept it, and public unions will be forced to accept massive concessions in bankruptcy court.

Look for massive turmoil in the municipal bond market as a result.

This post was published at Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis >

Join the conversation about this story »

Detroit has been bankrupt for years. It simply refuses to admit it. Detroit's schools are bankrupt as well. A mere 25% of students graduate from high school.

Yet, in spite of hints and threats from mayors and budget commissions, and in spite of common sense talk of bankruptcy, Detroit has not pulled the bankruptcy trigger.

In a futile attempt to stave off the inevitable one last time, Mayor Bing's latest plan is to cutoff city services including road repairs, police patrols, street lights, and garbage collection in 20% of Detroit.

Bing to Cede 20% of Detroit to Gangs and Homeless

City officials suggest this will not shrink the size of the city. Perhaps it won't shrink Detroit on Google Maps. However, Bing's plan would effectively surrender 20% of the city to gangs and the homeless.

Would you want to live in one of the gang war-zones that his plan would create? Would you want to live in a bordering neighborhood or in a bordering city?

Regardless of your answer, Bing's plan cannot and will not work and I believe Detroit will, sometime in 2011, file for bankruptcy. If so, expect massive turmoil in municipal bonds.

Less Than a Full-Service City

The Wall Street Journal discusses Bing's plan in Less Than a Full-Service City

More than 20% of Detroit's 139 square miles could go without key municipal services under a new plan being developed for the city, with as few as seven neighborhoods seen as meriting the city's full resources.

Those details, outlined by Detroit planning officials this week, offer the clearest picture yet of how Mayor Dave Bing intends to execute what has become his signature program: reconfiguring Detroit to reflect its declining population and fiscal health. Yet the blueprint still leaves large legal and financial questions unresolved.

Mr. Bing's staff wants to concentrate Detroit's remaining population—expected to be less than 900,000 after this year's Census count—and limited local, state and federal dollars in the most viable swaths of the city, while other sectors could go without such services as garbage pickup, police patrols, road repair and street lights.

Karla Henderson, a city planning official leading the mayor's campaign, said in an interview Thursday that her staff had deemed just seven to nine sections of Detroit worthy of receiving the city's full resources. She declined to identify the areas, but said the final plan could include a greater number.

"What we have found is that even some of our stronger neighborhoods are at a tipping point with vacancy," Ms. Henderson said. "Vacancy adds to blight and blight is a disease that takes over the whole neighborhood. So the sooner we can get those homes occupied, the better for the city."

Officials bristle when their efforts are described as downsizing, saying their aim is to repurpose portions of the city, not redraw its borders. "We will not be shrinking the city," Ms. Henderson said. "We are 139 [square] miles and we'll stay that way."

Repurpose or Abandon?

Of course the Mayor's office did not say they would abandon sections of the city to gangs. But how the hell can repurposing as described above possibly mean anything else?

What's next? Barbed wire? Oh wait a minute, Detroit already has tried that. Razor-wire too. Here's a picture of Detroit's clearly abandoned repurposed Michigan Central Train Depot.



Image courtesy of the Journal and the AP.

Detroit's Tax Collection Process

The Detroit Free Press points out Detroit botched Packard plant tax collection

The City of Detroit has failed for nearly four years to send property tax bills to the owner of the Packard plant, costing the city badly needed cash.

At 3.5 million square feet, the plant is by far the largest derelict property in Detroit.

It wasn't until the Free Press began making inquiries last week that the city's assessor's office returned the property to the tax rolls -- with an assessed value of nearly $1.6 million. The change came nearly four years after a Michigan Supreme Court decision prompted the city to surrender the century-old plant to Bioresource, a company whose last listed corporate representative is a convicted drug dealer.



Last week, less than 18 hours after a reporter questioned why the property was listed as city-owned, the assessor's office changed its status to "taxable." The property's assessed value ballooned from almost nothing to nearly $1.6 million.

Robin Boyle, professor of urban planning at Wayne State University, said the error underscores "just how challenged the city is in dealing with the fundamental task of title, control, oversight and follow-through" with property throughout the city.

"To me, that is a fundamental problem that leaves Detroit in a consistently weakened position. It can't even do the basics," Boyle said. "This is a huge piece of real estate, and yet, there's still confusion."

Although only one tenant remains on the property, the plant is not entirely neglected. Scrappers prowl it for metal. Graffiti artists decorate its walls. Someone perched TV sets atop pillars standing at least 15 feet tall.

And it can all be yours for $13 million.

David Wax, senior associate with Burger Easton & Co. in Farmington Hills, has listed the property for sale for a couple of years. He said there was a good deal of interest before the world economic crisis and before steel prices collapsed, making the Packard plant less attractive to buy and then demolish for its metal.

"For 13 years it's been vandalized, raped, burned, stripped of anything of value," Wax said. And on any given day, he said, you can hear "people with hammers and cutting torches cutting steel out of the building."

Packard Closeup Images

The Business Insider has fantastic set of images of the beautiful $13 million Packard property. Here are a couple of those images.





Now that the building has been put back on the active tax rolls to a convicted drug dealer, this is the sequence of events I imagine would transpire were Detroit to stay on its existing path using Bing's plan as the roadmap.

1. Detroit will send a tax bill to Bioresource
2. Bioresourse will not pay the bill
3. Detroit will reacquire the building in a tax sale with no bidders
4. In a couple of years Detroit will realize it once again owns the building
5. Detroit will repurpose the Packard plant with the same success as depicted in the Michigan Central Train Depot image.

Detroit Schools Bankrupt

Flashback July 24,2009: The Wall Street Journal reports Detroit’s Schools Are Going Bankrupt, Too

Now’s the time to cast off collective bargaining agreements and introduce school choice.

‘Am I optimistic that they can avoid it . . . ? I am not.” That’s what retired judge Ray Graves said this week when asked whether the Detroit public schools, which he is advising, would be forced into bankruptcy. Facing violence, a shrinking student body, and graduating just one out of every four students who enter the ninth grade on time, the city’s schools have been stumbling for years. Now they face a seemingly insurmountable deficit and are expected to file for bankruptcy protection at about the time that students should be settling down in a new school year.

As embarrassing as such a filing would be, it also may be the only thing that can force the kinds of changes Detroit schools need—as the financial turmoil is just the latest manifestation of a system in terminal decline.

Detroit is like many urban school districts—large, unwieldy and bureaucratic, with a powerful union that makes the system unable to adapt to changing circumstances and that until very recently had an indulgent political class that insulated it from reform. That insulation came in two forms. The first was neglect. Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick spent several years distracted by a scandal stemming from his affair with a staffer. He resigned last year, pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice, and was sentenced to four months in jail. Had he been an effective mayor, he might have also been a powerful advocate for students.

The other insulating force was a conscious decision to wall off Detroit from charter schools. In 1993, Michigan’s legislature made it difficult to create new charters in Detroit by declaring that only community colleges could authorize charters for primary and secondary schools in “First-Class Districts”—defined as those with more than 100,000 students. Detroit was the only First-Class District. In 2003 the state, under pressure from the Detroit Federation of Teachers, turned down a gift of $200 million from philanthropist Robert Thompson that would have established 15 charter schools in the city. Those charters are needed today.

The net result has been a school system that’s been coming apart as the teachers union has dug in its heels. In 2006, the union illegally went on strike, killing a plan to force teachers to take a pay cut to balance the system’s books.

Collective Bargaining has Morally and Fiscally Bankrupted Detroit Schools

Read that again. Under pressure from the Teachers' Union, Detroit turned down $200 Million. That was in 2003 dollars. Wow. No doubt the union "did it for the kids".

For more on the appalling behavior of Detroit's teachers' unions please see Detroit Public Schools (25% graduation rate) teachers unions opposing highly qualified volunteer teachers.

It is time to kill collective bargaining for public unions, every one of them, and nation-wide, not just Detroit.

Detroit Bankruptcy Looms

Flashback April 6, 2010: Detroit Bankruptcy Looms with Deficit of $446 Million in Budget of $1.6 Billion

Detroit has hit the end of the line. It's budget deficit is between $446 million and $466 million (28% to 29%) of $1.6 billion with few ways other than drastic cuts in wages and benefits to address the problem.

If unions will not give in (and they won't), Detroit Faces Bankruptcy.
With that introduction, inquiring minds are diving into the Citizens Research Council report on The Fiscal Condition of the City of Detroit

The Economic Base

The deterioration of the economic base of the city has accelerated. There were an estimated 81,754 vacant housing units (22.2 percent of the total) in Detroit before the recession; that number increased to an estimated 101,737 (27.8 percent of the total) in 2008.

The average price of a residential unit sold in the January through November, 2009 period was $12,439, down from $97,847 in 2003. Remaining businesses and individuals are challenging property tax assessments on parcels that have lost value and, in some cases, cannot be sold at any price.

More than half of employed city residents work outside the city limits; the metro area has the highest unemployment rate of the 100 major metro areas in the U.S.

Detroit Should Embrace Bankruptcy

The only legitimate solution for Detroit is to shed pension obligations, privatize everything it can including the fire department, and dump unions contracts en masse. Since those items can only happen in restructuring, Detroit should openly embrace bankruptcy.

Detroit Warns of Bankruptcy as It Prepares Bond Sale

Flashback March 5, 2010: Detroit Warns of Bankruptcy as It Prepares Bond Sale

Detroit, the largest U.S. city whose debt is rated below investment grade, warned investors of the risk of bankruptcy as it prepares to sell $250 million of bonds to help close its budget deficit.

The city told bondholders in a March 2 preliminary offering statement that while it hasn’t taken steps to reorganize under Chapter 9, it may have few other options if its financial condition worsens. Detroit officials also detailed the steps they would have to take should bankruptcy become necessary.

“If the city’s financial status were to deteriorate further the city’s options to improve its fiscal health may be limited,” Detroit said in the statement. Bondholders “should not expect that their rights to payment and remedies will not be adversely affected by filing under the bankruptcy code.”

“We are still in a financial crisis but insolvency isn’t on the horizon or on the agenda at this time,” Mayor Dave Bing said in an e-mail from his spokesman, Dan Lijana. The total deficit this year is estimated at $280 million.

Bing Still Pretends - How Long Can It Last?

For reasons unknown, Bing just cannot do what is right. He will not come flat out and say what everyone in their right mind knows - that Detroit is fiscally and morally bankrupt and so are its schools.

Instead, on December 10, 2010 Detroit Borrows $100 Million for Police and Fire Headquarters.

Detroit, whose population has dropped by half since 1950, borrowed $100 million to turn the MGM Grand Casino’s former site into a headquarters for the police, fire and emergency-services departments.

The city sold so-called Recovery Zone Bonds authorized under the U.S. economic-stimulus plan, borrowing at 4.55 percent, the city said in a press release today. The bonds, with the longest term maturing in 2035, were sold through the Michigan Finance Authority by investment banks led by Siebert Brandford Shank & Co., according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

“The financial markets believe in what we’re doing to bring fiscal responsibility back to Detroit,” said Mayor Dave Bing, in a prepared statement today.

So-called recovery zone bonds were included in the economic-stimulus package signed by President Barack Obama last year to help expand the economy of areas with poverty and unemployment. They’re a type of Build America Bond that comes with a 45 percent interest subsidy rather than 35 percent rate under the Build America program, which expires Dec. 31.

The bonds were rated A1, or fifth highest, by Moody’s Investor’s Service and AA-, or fourth highest, by Standard & Poor’s.

BABs Set to End December 31, 2010

Note the ridiculous rating of those bonds by Moody's and by Standard & Poor’s. If the Federal government is backing those bonds, then they are AAA. If not, they are junk. There is no in-between.

Thankfully, the extremely ridiculous Build-America-Bond program will expire on December 31. When it does, no one in their right mind will lend Detroit money, and that at long-last will mean "lights out" for Detroit.

A new Republican governor takes over in Michigan next year, complete with a new Republican legislature. I believe Governor-Elect Rick Snyder will be amenable to fixing what ails Detroit and numerous other cities in Michigan.

Should Mayor Bing not seek bankruptcy assistance, I propose for Governor Snyder to force Detroit into bankruptcy. It is the only hope Detroit has. Mayor Bing is clearly in over his head.

Governor Snyder would be a hero if he can turn Detroit around, and outside of bankruptcy that appears impossible.

Thus, forced or not, I believe Detroit will file bankruptcy in 2011, the state will accept it, and public unions will be forced to accept massive concessions in bankruptcy court.

Look for massive turmoil in the municipal bond market as a result.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com
Click Here To Scroll Thru My Recent Post List

Imagine that the president is considering his options vis-à-vis the Iranian nuclear program. First, a science advisor comes into the room and predicts that if the Iranians take the following quantity of fissile material and compress it into a sphere of the following size under the following conditions, then it will cause an explosion large enough to destroy a major city. Next, an historian comes into the room, and predicts that if external attempts are made to thwart Iranian nuclear ambitions, then a popular uprising will sooner or later ensue in Iran that will change governments until Iran has achieved nuclear capability.

The president would be incredibly irresponsible to begin debating nuclear physics with his science advisor. Conversely, the president would be incredibly irresponsible not to begin a debate with the historian. This would likely include having several historians present different perspectives, querying them on their logic and evidence, combining this with introspection about human motivations, considering prior life experience, consulting with non-historians who might have useful perspectives on this, and so on.

Next, an economist walks into the room. She predicts that if the CIA were to successfully execute a proposed Iranian currency counterfeiting scheme designed to create an additional ten points of inflation in Iran for the next five years, then the change in Iranian employment over the next decade would be X. Is this more like the historian’s prediction or the physicist’s prediction?

Superficially, she might sound a lot more like the physicist. If pressed for an explanation of how she reached this conclusion, she would use lots of empirical data, equations and technical language. The problem is that the abstraction from reality implied by the data and equations is vastly more severe for the economist than for the physicist. Some parts of the prediction would have some firm foundation, e.g., a build-up of alternative production capacity at all known manufacturing plants based on measurement of physical capacity. But lots of things would arguably remain outside the grasp of formal models. How would consumer psychology in Iran respond to this change, and how would this then translate to overall demand changes? How would the economy respond to this problem over time by shifting resources to new sectors, and what innovations would this create? How would political reactions by other countries lead to war and other decisions, which would, in turn, feedback to economic changes? And so on, ad infinitum.

Any sensible economist would, of course, put all kinds of qualifications around her ten year employment prediction to reflect such issues. Often (and this kind of language goes back all the way at least to J.S. Mill) such complexities will be described as something like “disturbances” around the “basic thrust” or “central trend” or whatever. But once these qualifications are accepted as material, then how do we evaluate the reliability of the prediction? That is, how do we know that the “disturbances” aren’t, in fact, more fundamental than the “basic thrust” of the economic theory?

The physicist’s answer to challenges to the reliability of his prediction is simple: Please view the following film taken from a long series of huge explosions that result when independent evaluators combine the materials I described in the manner I described. Note that this prediction is not absolutely certain. It is possible, as per Hume, that the laws of physics will change one second from now, or that there is some unique, undiscovered physical anomaly in Iran such that these physical laws do not apply there. But for all practical purposes, the president can take this predictive rule as a known fact.

How would the economist respond if challenged with respect to the reliability of her prediction? As far as I can see, she can respond with recourse to three lines of evidence: (i) a priori beliefs about human nature, and conclusions that are believed to be logically derivable from them, (ii) analysis of historical data, which is to say, data-driven theory-building, and (iii) a review of the track record of prior predictions made using the predictive rule in question. The analogous lines of evidence that the physicist could have used would be (i) common sense observations of the physical world, and conclusions that are believed to be logically derivable form them, (ii) analysis of observational data, historical experiments and the logic of the physical theories that were developed from these sources, and used to create the predictive rule in question, and (iii) the results of controlled experiments that tested the predictive rule in question. The reason the physicist need only concentrate on (iii) is that controlled experiments are accepted as the so-called “scientific gold standard” method for testing theories. Distrust of untested theories, no matter how persuasive they sound, has been central to the scientific method at least since the time of Francis Bacon. Note that the first president faced with this kind of a briefing actually had an enormously expensive experiment conducted to test the theory in Trinity, New Mexico before using nuclear weapons.

The problem with the economist’s reference to her version of (iii) is that, in practice, so many things change in a macroeconomic event that it is not realistic to isolate the causal impact of any one factor. To call some of these macro events “natural experiments,” is almost always to dress up rhetoric in analytical language. In analyses of true macro events as natural experiments, you will almost inevitably find either unsupported assumptions (or in the sophisticated cases, econometric modeling) embedded within the analysis of the “experiment” because of non-random assignment of units of analysis to alternative treatments and other issues. It is really more observational data. Further, even the definition of the “event” within the continuous flow of history embeds all kinds of assumptions.

This brings us back to where we started. How does the economist know that her predictions, which sound like the physicist’s predictions, are reliable in a way that the historian’s are not? She doesn’t. Therefore the president would be wise to treat the economist’s prediction like the historian’s prediction, in that it should be subjected to useful cross-examination by laymen, weighing of technical and non-technical opinions, introspection concerning human motivation, and all the rest. Beyond this, he should always keep in mind the unreliability of such predictions, and treat the fog of uncertainty about the potential effects of our actions as fundamental when considering what to do. I’m not arguing that the economist’s output is valueless – I would no more advise a president to make a major economic decision without professional economic advice than I would advise him to make a decision about war and peace with consulting relevant historians – but I am arguing that we should be extremely humble about our ability to make reliable, useful and non-obvious predictions about the results of our economic interventions.

I think that this story gets to the essence of an exchange that I have been having with economist Karl Smith. In his most recent post in this series, responding to my challenge to him – “You say that you have the ability to predict the effect of stimulus. Prove it.” – Smith says this:

I don’t think think I am saying this. At least, not how I think Jim means it. I am saying I have reason to believe that the effects of stimulus will be X and I can make an argument for it.

I accept that Smith has (non-trivial) reasons that support his beliefs about what will happen in response to stimulus, and that he can make an informed argument for them. More than this, I agree that his theory is at least plausible. My question continues to be the same: Where is the proof that his plausible theory is correct?

Smith goes on to argue that no predictive rule even in physical science is ever proven in the absolute philosophical sense.

I sometimes tell my students that scientists don’t prove, mathematicians and philosophers prove. Scientists accumulate evidence that seems to suggest.

This I think is true in all fields of science and is doubly true when that science is applied to actually engineering results in the real world. Not only have well relied upon theories in physics been upended upon careful examination but there is no one I know of who can design an airplane using a physics textbook. Nor, would many people trust an airplane to fly without testing it first.

And, despite despite all of the testing that is done, airplanes can a do malfunction and crash. There simply isn’t a “proving it” when it comes to making predictions about the real world. What we hope to do is give an answer that’s better than random and better than folk wisdom. [Bold added]

Smith won’t get a lot of debate on this from me. As he indicates, no matter how great the engineers sound when describing the plans for a spiffy new engineering feature on a plane, we still want test flights. And no number of tests can ever prove in a philosophical sense that this predictive rule will continue to operate in future contexts. And further, the standard for accepting this proposed feature is normally not “scores perfectly on every test every time,” but is instead more like “is superior to the existing alternatives.”

So, Smith here seems to me to be accepting the principle that the standard of evidence by which we should judge a predictive rule is by how it stands up to rigorous, real-world tests. It is the straightforward application of this principle that leads me to ask for the tests that show some proposed predictive rule (“the effects of stimulus will be X”) is, in fact, “better than random and better than folk wisdom.”

Smith’s response is that:

Now perhaps Jim is not confident that we can achieve our goal of beating randomness and folk wisdom. There are two basic lines of reasoning I can offer.

One is evidence and logic.

He goes on to argue that, in effect, even without formal testing of the theory, external to the theory-building process, we should take the arguments internal to the theory seriously, as they are built on a lot more than “hey, sounds good to me.”

To use Smith’s analogy, this is like saying that these are very smart aeronautical engineers who have applied well-accepted engineering principles to create this new feature. The thing is, as he indicates, we still would like to see actual test flights for a sufficiently important change. The whole point of our exchange is that economic theories don’t get a free pass from falsification tests. Quite the opposite, in fact: The astounding complexity of the subject matter under consideration should lead us to be even more skeptical of counter-intuitive claims made in social science than of those made in physical science.

He goes to describe a second argument, which is closer to what I have meant by falsification testing. He begins with this:

The second line I offer is that of experience. That when economists had the helm we really were able to produce results. In the 1980s Central Banks were largely turned over to their economists who produced low inflation and low unemployment by manipulating the overnight lending rate.

This is the crux of his reply, and it strikes me as not very compelling. First, it seems to beg the question. Lots and lots of important things happened on planet Earth in the 1980s. How do we know that it was the central banks who “produced” low inflation and low unemployment? Where is Smith’s evidence that he has isolated causality in this way? It is a textbook example of a highly confounded problem. Second, even if we were to give central banks complete credit for the economy of 1980 – 2008, Smith would then further have to show (i) that it was the application of some specific predictive rule for the effect of stimulus that accounted for this results starting in the 1980s, and (ii) that we can reliably generalize this hypothetical rule to the situation for 2008 – 2010, before this would count as empirical verification of some rule to be used to predict the effects of the stimulus program under consideration.

Smith extends this example, and concludes with this:

If you are arguing that I don’t know for sure that these tools will work then you are right. I don’t know. What I am suggesting is that the same logic and evidence that worked for controlling the overnight rate is telling me certain things now.

I don’t ask that you simply trust this. We can go through the models. We can go through the logic. We can look at all the evidence. However, at the end of the day we have to make a choice. Even the choice to do nothing is a choice, with consequences for which we will be responsible.

I think making our choice based on logic, evidence and the experience of the Great Moderation is the way to go.

Of course we have to make choices all the time, and we can’t opt out of the game; but the issue under consideration is the reliability of the predictions of macroeconomic theories for the future effects of various alternative potential decisions. As I’ve said before, Smith sounds like a smart and practical guy, but does this sound like the economics profession has created a good answer to my request for proof? Does this sound like something that should lead a rational observer to reject other lines of non-technical reasoning as irrelevant in the way we would in the case of actual scientific knowledge?

With Joomla 1.6 nearing completion the thoughts of many have been turning to "the next step":

• What features would you like to see in the next version?
• Where do you see Joomla heading over the next release cycle and beyond?
• What do you think Joomla should look like over the next several iterations? And so on.

There are two extremes on the scale of viewpoints about how open source projects should be run. At one extreme, we have the "benevolent dictator" approach where a single leader decides, in isolation, what will be incorporated into the codebase and what will not. At the opposite extreme, we have a project where all decisions are taken in the democratic tradition of a majority vote.

Of course, Joomla has never been, nor should it ever be, at either of these extremes. But it's fair to say that the gradual evolution of the project has seen us move further from the dictatorial towards the democratic end of the spectrum. We have always sought to be a community-led project; our leadership teams are drawn from the community and as leaders, we manage the project on behalf of the community. There is no large corporation or individual dictator with an overwhelming influence on us and the commercial prosperity of the Joomla ecosystem is in large part due to the decentralised, non-profit nature of the organisation.

So how should we steer the future development of the software that we create?

The Joomla Ideas Pool

Over the 5 years or so since the project's inception, we have been systematically lowering barriers to participation and today we are launching a new process for gathering suggestions for future versions of Joomla that will make it even easier for members of our global community to help shape the future development of the software. This new process comes in two parts, the first of which is aimed at collecting ideas for new features and assessing their popularity through a voting system, while the second is a formal procedure for monitoring and tracking feature suggestions.

New ideas come from many places and can come from anyone in the community. We like to use the Google Group mailing lists for the CMS since it's a great place to brainstorm, but the Joomla People site also works well; or indeed anywhere Joomla folks congregate.

The Joomla Idea Pool (JIP), which is based on UserVoice, is a way for anyone in the community to make their voice heard and help set priorities. Each user has ten votes to cast on the various ideas, which will help make clear what future features the community really wants.

It is important to understand that not all features will be added to Joomla. This may happen for a number of reasons. For example, there may be a great feature proposed but either nobody volunteers to take it on, or the PLT decides it is better implemented as a separate extension rather than part of the core CMS or Platform. Our hope is that many or all of the most popular features on the JIP will have a strong chance of attracting energetic development talent to complete them. Once a feature has moved to the implementation stage, it starts its journey along the second part of our new process by getting added to the Joomla Feature Tracker.

The Joomla Feature Tracker

The Joomla Feature Tracker (JFT) is the team's way of tracking the progress of a feature and encouraging more collaboration during development. Once an idea has reached the point where it has some level of support and is ready for more serious discussion, or even coding, then it can and should be added to the JFT. This allows it to be tracked more easily and acts as a focal point for activity regarding a new feature. There is more detailed explanation of how items will be moved through the JFT process on the Joomla Developer Network site.

To get this new process started the PLT has seeded the JIP with the feature suggestions that we discussed at the San Jose Summit and which together comprise our vision for the next Joomla release. You can read our vision statement in an announcement on the main joomla.org site.

So, for those asking the question "where next for Joomla development?", we say remember what Alan Kay famously said:

"The best way to predict the future is to invent it."

So get on over to the Joomla Idea Pool now and help us invent the future of Joomla.

Brazilian Baile Funk Queen Zuzuka Poderosa came to town straight out of Brooklyn. Zuzuka started a 4 day west coast tour at Sol Collective in Sacramento. Natalia Linares set up an interview with Zuzuka before her performance.

The Sacramento Press: Your music is very catchy and is mostly in Portuguese. You do mix in a line or two in English; do you plan to do any recordings in English?

Zuzuka: I’m starting to sing in English because I’m trying to get past the fear of, you know, being self conscious about it. There have been a few songs where I’ve thrown in an English hook which I’m going to do tonight. I try to do the same thing in other languages like with Spanish. I’m looking forward to singing in Spanish, also English and Portuguese.

SP: I can understand that with Spanish and the big audience you have in New York with Spanish speakers. At the same time music is international and hopefully we can all pick up some of your lyrics.

Zuzuka: Definitely like with baile funk. What captures people with baile funk is the rhythm, the bass, the flow that’s in there. So once I apply English or Spanish lyrics then everything comes together.

SP: How would you describe the type of music you create?

Zuzuka: I’m a vocalist and I have a lot of influences. I started as a vocalist with baile funk music and it’s not necessarily all I would like to do. I want to go beyond, I want to mix cultures and influences and make something new and at the same time maybe something not so new. I’d just like to see where the music is going to take us. It’s about the many influences in my life. My influences include music like old funk and soul, I love Rock and roll, I love folk music, I like everything you name it. I have Indonesian background. I have an Indonesian father who had a huge collection of Indonesian music. I wish I spoke the language but unfortunately I don’t. If I did speak the language I would totally make baile funk Bali. Oh yeah Bali Funk that would be great, Indo(nesian) Funk, with music it becomes endless.

SP: How long have you been involved in this?

Zuzuka: As vocalists? As a vocalist I’ve been doing this about 5 years and before that I was a DJ, but I’ve always been interested in music. I took classes and I’ve always had teachers that were encouraging. I’ve always wanted to be perfect and then one day I decided, well maybe it wasn’t just me that decided but my friends recognized that. After a while I decided to do something, I decided I should sing. I gave singing a shot and the first song I did was a big hit and I didn’t stop there people were really into to so I pursued it.

SP: It sounds like you found a market and expanded your horizons. Listening to your music it sounds like you really want to expand yourself and you have a lot of culture in your sounds. It’s like you’re always looking for new things is that part of your goal?

Zuzuka: I do that exactly. I’m a culture connoisseur and I’ve always been very curious about different sounds.

SP: So you live in Brooklyn now?

Zuzuka: Yes, I live in Brooklyn now, I love living in Brooklyn. I lived in Queens before that, I loved Queens.

SP: Do you ever go back to Brazil?

Zuzuka: I do. I go back to Brazil once a year. I did not go back last year but I will. I’m also going to visit my brother in Costa Rica. I also have Costa Rican family.

SP: Do you still have family in Brazil?

Zuzuka: Most of my family is still in Brazil. It’s too cold for them to come to New York; it’s also too hot for them to come to New York. They need to have the beach nearby.

SP: Yeah, when we think about Brazil that’s what comes to mind; sunny weather and being near or on the beach.

Zuzuka: Last time I went to Brazil I was fortunate to work with and toured with hip hop artist Marcelo D2. Marcelo D2 is one of the biggest rappers in Brazil he used to be in a band and then went solo and he’s very amazing. He’s like the Jay-Z of Brazil. Basically, he saw my page on MySpace and he saw what I was doing and he was looking for a vocalist to do specifically this one song. I was invited and it was such a surprise, it was amazing to be part of the Brazilian hip hop culture.

SP: Is this the first time you’ve been out in the West Coast?

Zuzuka: Yeah, I’m so excited. I’ve always loved Cali. Actually when I was living in Queens I wanted to move here and I was making plans to move to San Diego but changed my mind and decided not to come and then I never made it here. With this tour I’m just happy to be here I love it, it’s so beautiful!

SP: So did you watch the World Cup this summer? (Looks at me unhappily) I laugh. I had to ask.

Zuzuka: Ok, can I tell you something? Ok this is the deal; Brazil sucked this year. I wanted Mexico to win the cup. Brazil does not need to win right now, first of all they sucked this year if they were really good, ok I would cheer for them but they were terrible. Listen why can’t somebody that’s never won before win? That’s Mexico so I was cheering for them, am I wrong? But next time Brazil is going to be much better. I will be there I’ll be supporting them and everything will be different. I will be there for the World Cup.

SP: So what American artists do you listen to?

Zuzuka: Wow that’s a hard question. There are so many friends who are artist who I listen to. I love Ben Harper for instance, Dave Nada from DC. I love the tropical movement, I love so many artists. Sonora from Texas, Tanlines from Brooklyn, there are so many, too many to name.

SP: Do you work alone or with a group of collaborators?

Zuzuka: I’m a solo artist and work with different producers that’s the way I like to mix music and cultures. Every producer I’ve worked with has brought in different influences. When they do different types of music I listen to them and implement my baile funk music and Portuguese lyrics into their work and make something different. Most often than not it results as a different type of music.

SP: Do you consider yourself a vocalist or DJ primarily?

Zuzuka: Well it’s changed I was a DJ now I’m a vocalist primarily. I’m still in the process of growing as a vocalist.

SP: Do you have any projects now or in the future that you can talk about?

Zuzuka: Sure. I am in the process of going to different places after this west coast tour. Hopefully I’ll be in Europe next year as well.

SP: Do you do any acting or commercials?

Zuzuka: In the bathroom, when I look into the mirror. Yes I do acting in the mirror.

SP: Just wondering if you did commercials because you can fit into many categories; exotic, Asian, Latin, you fit into a lot of categories.

Zuzuka: Like I said I do act in the bathroom, I practice in front of a mirror.

SP: Do you like to tour?

Zuzuka: Yes I like to tour. This is my first tour in the west coast; actually this is my first visit ever to the west coast. It’s like a moment I’ve been waiting for such a long time.

SP: Do you do like an annual tour or something on a regular basis?

Zuzuka: Most of the time I go to Brazil so I do tour in Brazil. I also tour in Europe but I have so many other projects that I work on those and I travel to many places. I have so many people that I work with, like I work for MTV, like I did a commercial for Coca Cola. There are little projects that I work with things get really busy and then I travel, travel, and travel! So that was my main focus for a while, now I’m ready to travel everywhere. I’m blending everything; I feel that people are more open to the whole movement. Now they’re open to the tropical movement.

SP: Is there anything that you feel deep inside that you’d like to pass on to your Sacramento fans?

Zuzuka: You know just being here and seeing everybody it’s really exciting. Everybody is so open minded and I feel great that everyone’s welcomed me in with an open heart. There’s people from everywhere here it’s just great. I feel like I’m at home too. I feel at home with different cultures, yeah I love it. Thanks for everything Sacramento, thanks for inviting me.

That was the end of the interview. Zuzuka was very lively during the interview. She was very eager to share her experiences and talk about anything. Her very beautiful exotic look gave way to her outgoing personality and show of emotions.

Her DJ, Colin Johnson, also known as DJ Righteous Trash helped Zuzuka put on an extraordinary performance. Zuzuka on stage, as well as off stage, provided an energetic mix with lively vocals and dancing. I believe that as this tour comes and goes her following will continue to grow. She’s well established in the East Coast and her West Coast tour will expose her to a wider audience. Sacramento welcomed her and enjoyed her performance. You can check out her videos on YouTube and follow her on her Facebook page as well.

Besides the birthday celebration for the Sol Collective family, Estella, and Anand the evening was a celebration of dance, cultures and music.

Other activities through the night included a photo booth by Amanda Lopez and a henna station with Nicole Limon serving as the henna artist. Along the back room of Sol Collective a couple of DJs played. One of them was DJ Admant and in the main room DJ Righteous Trash and others took turns mixing it up. Others scheduled to be on hand were Wonway, Crush Delight and Chorizo Funk among others.

Righteous Trash (Colin Johnson) was Zuzuka’s DJ while she performed and was going to be with her on this tour. Johnson is from L.A. and he indicated they will be ending the tour at the Bardot in Hollywood which will have a theme by the name of School Night. Righteous has been a promoter, music booking agent and DJ. “I’m a promoter no matter what official name I have“, Righteous said. He’s been involved in the music industry in Los Angeles and Seattle for quite a few years. He was responsible for welcoming many international artists to Seattle for the first time including Jamaican artists. As a promoter he's always been global minded. “Now I try to bring cultures together. I try to represent bands from Europe, Africa, and just about everywhere. I currently handle regionally the U.S. and Canada setting up tours. Music is my life and I’m fortunate to be involved with artists such as Zuzuka.” He credits mutual friends for getting them together for this project. He is very knowledgeable about the music business and can be a good promoter for Zuzuka. Righteous has been around for a while and he also indicated that he has family from Sacramento.

The show itself was very energetic and fun. Many audience members were on the dance floor from beginning to end. Zuzuka seemed to enjoy herself and got everybody involved. “I love you Sacramento!” she screamed as she continued to sing and dance. After the show she posed for pictures with her new Sacramento fans. Sol Collective provided a very enjoyable evening.

Photos by David Alvarez
 

It's been decided that our district curriculum council will be making recommendations about the approach our district takes to online learning.

I'm not the most enthusiastic supporter of online classes. I've been both the perpetrator and victim of such experiences at the post-secondary level and because of our district's size, I've never seen the kind of need some of our smaller neighboring districts have for such classes.

So. yes, our district is a bit slow on the uptake compared to some places, but I am hoping we do this right. And doing it right means identifying the "why" of online before getting to the "how." I do NOT want this to become a model for the "ready, fire, aim" approach I chide others of using.

Some pretty serious questions need to be asked and answered before a plan takes shape. It's not just "Should we set up a Moodle server?" Here are some things we need to discuss and on which we need to reach some kind of consensus before we get to the "how":

What problems does online instruction solve or what opportunities does it create?
Schools have adopted online instruction opportunities for a variety of reasons:

• To enrich and make more effective regular classes
• To provide a wider range of course offerings to students - those that cannot be provide in-house
• To provide learning opportunities for students who cannot attend regular classes
• To meet the needs of students who do not do well in face-to-face instructional settings
• To provide credit recovery
• To provide student experience with online learning environments to prepare them for the workforce and higher ed

What is our reason for providing online instruction and does it fit into our district-wide strategic plan?

How do we define online learning?
Online learning is a mean of delivering instruction using technology tools that complement face-to-face instruction or reduce/eliminate the need for face-to-face instruction. The instruction can be Internet-based or delivered via video networks (ITV). Instruction can be synchronous or asynchronous.

• Hybrid classes (blended classes) - face-to-face classes that use online learning tools to supplement instruction
• Fully online classes provided by the district (Do we offer these to students other than our own?)
• Fully online classes purchased by the district

What does research say about the effectiveness of online learning?
It is neither more or less effective than face-to-face instruction. See: U.S. Department of Education Evaluation of Evidence-Based Practices in Online Learning

What resources are currently available to our teachers that can facilitate online learning?
Mankato Schools currently provides a number of tools that can engage students in online learning opportunities, primarily in support of face-to-face instruction. All teachers have access to:

• GoogleApps for Education
  • e-mail, shared calendars, mailing lists, contact information
  • shared documents - word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, surveys
  • mult-content website creation
• rSchoolToday website/content management system
  • blogs
  • contact information
  • directories
  • discussion forums
  • document library
  • e-forms
  • FAQs
  • feedback form
  • galleries
  • homework dropbox
  • links
  • mulit-content webpages
  • podcasting
  • policies library
  • RSS newsfeeds
  • surveys
  • tables
  • wikis
• Open network access to other tools. (the district does not block access to any education tools available including wikis, blogs, photo/video sharing sites. bookmarking sites, multi-media content creation tools, etc.

What does Moodle offer, is it needed, and how might it best be deployed? What support structure, technical and training, does it require? Among course management tools, would others better support our goals?

Moodle is an open-source learning management system designed to create fully online classes or to augment face-to-face classes (often called hybrid or blended classes).

• class schedule
• assignment drop box
• participant profiles
• wikis
• forums
• interactive glossary
• monitored discussions
• quizzes - graded instantaneously, providing feedback
• peer feedback and self assessment
• real time chat with other students enrolled in the same course
• network resources with other teachers
• tracks when a student has viewed a document, how long they spent in a forum and when they uploaded or posted an assignment
• embed videos
• post resources
• Integrated with Google Apps for Education

It is available through our regional telecommunications organization, SOCRATES. SOCRATES requires eight hours of training on Moodle usage to be considered proficient. The Wikipedia article on Moodle.

What skills do teachers need to successfully teach online and how might they acquire them?
Is there a commitment by our staff development department to offer online teaching/learning skill training? Is the district willing to require some competency on the part of all instructors?

Should there be a set of minimum expectations for an online presence for all teachers? If so what? What might be eliminated to make room for these expectations? See Mandatory Web Presence Recommendations created in 2003 and updated Fall 2010.

How do we evaluate the effectiveness of online learning efforts?

Does the teacher contract address online learning - or does it need to?
Past investigations into online learning via ITV have led to concern regarding teacher compensation for such classes.

What critical questions are going unasked and unanswered?

 Image source: http://tyrashow.warnerbros.com/2010/03/online_education_makes_sense.php

Millions of tweets run through Twitter. It's the poster child for big data on the Web.

To get data out of Twitter and use it to track sentiment requires tools with considerable processing and computational capabilities.

BigSheets is a tool created by IBM that takes terabytes or even petabytes of Web data and turns it into information that provides business intelligence. The tool can be used for structured or unstructured data from internal or external sources. For instance, it can run streams of Twitter data for days, weeks or even months on particular keywords. That data can then be mashed up with internal information.

Sponsor

To demonstrate its capabilties, IBM Evangeist David Barnes created an excellent demonstration video that shows how Twitter can be mined for sentiment about the iPhone, BlackBerry or Android mobile smartphones.

We took some segments from the video to explain a process that is not nearly as technical as we thought it would be.

Barnes showed how the tool mined Twitter for tweets that mentioned the smartphone terms: iPhone, Android and BlackBerry. He then tracked the tweets for sentiment. Do people like, love or hate the products? Do they want to buy the products?

The tool can also be used to track multiple web sites for hours, days, weeks or months.
During the video, Barnes mined the Twitter stream for three minutes using the smartphone keywords. He had previously ran a query for 36 hours to demonstrate hopw the data can be used. It pulled 305,000 tweets into the application.

BigSheets classified it by the name of the user, the time of the tweet, what the tweet said and other associated metadata.

Making a Tag Cloud

Barnes then applied the sentiment language to the analysis. About 50,000 tweets showed sentiment. He then sought out tweets that expressed a sentiment to buy something.

Barnes then applied visualizaton software to create a tag cloud of the analyzed tweets.

Analyzing the British Parliament

In his last example, Barnes showed how BigSheets can scrape data from Web sites to do analysis. He did a query for people, places and things. That data resulted in data about crime and other matters. He cross referenced that data with the members of pariiament voting records.

What Would Facebook Look Like?

Like any good demo, Barnes leaves us with more questions about big data than we ever had before.

Take Facebook, for example. What would Mark Zuckerberg have created if he had this tool when creating the now famous social network? What will future developers create with tools like this built into what they create?

BigSheets is one of several data mining tools we are seeing that use MapReduce and other techniques to mine data. What's amazing is what the tools an do but also the accessibility of the tools themselves.

Discuss

50 miles off the coast of Papua New Guinea, the Carteret Islands are sinking due to the accelerating effects of climate change, and with them the livelihoods of the 3000 islanders who make their homes there. You might have heard part of the story of the Carterets in a spate of news coverage leading up to COP 15 last year, or perhaps even seen video of or read about Ursula Rakova, one of the islanders who has been active in international efforts (by Oxfam and others) to spotlight ‘climate refugees’. Now the political, cultural and emotional dilemmas of the Carterets are deftly explored in the new documentary Sun Come Up, which I had the fortune of seeing the other night.

The Carterets have decided they must relocate their entire population within the next five years, when the islands will become uninhabitable, and the central drama of the film revolves around their already-desperate search for a new home. It is, predictably, a riveting story. Yet even as the film moves you to try to personally help the Carterets, its point is obviously so much larger and, for those of us used to confronting climate change in the rarefied air of international summits and corporate boardrooms, or in the form of abstract projections about average warming of 2° vs. 3°C, so much more challenging.

What I took away is that the future of climate change is already here, and yet too often (and for too many of us), it still seems a world away. The film also underscores what we often forget: that climate change is more fundamentally a social rather than environmental issue, that its urgency is much more about basic needs – food, water, equity, justice and community – than about hashing out conflicts between sophisticated economic and environmental values. Actual lives are already being turned upside down.

The more I reflect on it, it’s hard not to take the film as a shot across the bow for many of us in the world of ‘professional’ sustainability (e.g. myself, my colleagues at SustainAbility, our clients and partners, and, if you’re reading this blog, likely you). Honestly, how much does what we do every day really have to do with the realities now being faced by people like the Carterets (much less those that tens of millions more will face as climate change and other issues continue to unfold)? Have we started to become just a little too comfortable with the cottage industry we helped create? Are we too satisfied with what we know is incremental progress at best, or too quick to give praise for even the most nominal efforts by others? Are we being honest with each other, or with ourselves, about how far we still have to go and what it will cost to get there?

In our defense, it is easy to become somewhat numb to the import of the issues we work on every day, or to take solace in the comforts of routine, friends and family, or a good hobby. Sun Come Up is a welcome antidote to this kind of sustainability fatigue, and a reminder to, as Michael Sadowski put it in another post on this blog, “listen to the music all around us.”

Indeed, the gift of such films is their motivational force. Intentionally exposing ourselves to the stories rather than just the statistics of climate change is a way to make ourselves better, to trigger in us the latent motivation we need to get the important work of our generation done, and to set the bar where it actually needs to be. When the consequences of climate change are literally staring us in the face – with distraught and tired eyes, asking us humbly for enough land to live on – it is impossible to look away. And that is what we need more than anything now: to not look away.

(PS – The filmmakers have teamed up to co-promote Sun Come Up alongside a range of other energy-themed documentaries, under the banner “Reel Power: Films Fueling the Energy Revolution”. They have a pretty cool trailer, which you can watch here.)

You still have two weeks to submit your work into the NASA and Etsy Space Craft Contest, and to help keep you on track, we asked astronaut Karen Nyberg about her own inspiration and creativity. Karen is a mission specialist, which means she has an engineering background — unlike pilots, who have military experience. She flew on board the space shuttle Discovery in 2008 on a mission to the international space station, and is currently training to do a long duration space flight. Interviewing Karen straight from our office supply closet, I could only have felt more authentic if the shuttle's controls were in my own hands.

What was going into space like? Was it everything you expected?
It was actually better than I expected. It was only 14 days, so it was busy and we had a lot of work to do, but it was incredible. Weightlessness is really neat, and the view of earth is incredible. Pictures don’t do it justice.

You've worked on patents. What’s the design process like for NASA technology and tools?
The neat thing is that the environment we design for is so unique. Obviously without gravity, things just don’t work the same. Every piece of equipment that you use on earth in some way relies on gravity. I’m looking at my telephone on the desk. Well, I hang the phone up, and the headset sits on the phone because there's gravity. It's simple things, but the sink in your kitchen works because there’s gravity. Every single thing that is designed for the space shuttle or space station has to work without gravity. That’s unique and it takes a lot of creativity to figure out how to make that work. Plus, since we’re launching all this stuff into space and it’s expensive to launch heavy things, you want to make what you design as lightweight as possible and that's another challenge.

How do you prepare for that?
Most of the people who work here at NASA and do that type of design have engineering backgrounds, and you learn in engineering to come up with fresh ideas. A lot of it comes from trying a design and if it doesn’t work, then you start again, and keep trying until you come up with something that works.

Prehistoric Planet by paulandkatestudio

I hear you like to sew, draw, and paint in your free time. What sort of projects do you enjoy?
Recently I’ve been sewing more than anything. I really enjoy quilting and appliquéing. I used to love doing portrait drawings in pencil and charcoal, and hopefully when I have more time, I can pick that back up again.

Have you found any parallels in your hobbies and your job?
I’m not so good at abstract art, and I think that has something to do with my engineering mind. There’s a correct way, and an incorrect way. When I draw and paint, I can only do it if I make it as realistic as possible.

What are you most inspired by?
When I work on projects at home, it’s a gift for somebody. Whoever I’m making it for is really where the inspiration comes from. I’ll look at their interests and what colors they like, and come up with a quilt design or idea accordingly. I’m inspired by giving something to somebody.

Warp Speed Through the Worm Hole by CynthiaArtGallery

If you were to submit a piece to the Etsy and NASA Space Craft Contest, what would it be?
I would love to work on a quilt that incorporates what I’ve seen in space and my experiences. I also like the idea of doing crew portrait drawings!

Thanks to Karen for sharing her story with us. Are you inspired by space when you create? Share in the comments below!

More Information About the Space Craft Contest | Art From Outer Space

Let's be realistic for a moment. We know the previous administration in the White House put the United States in this recession. Also spending money for a war when there was no Weapons of Mass Destruction. Question(s) How often have the Obama Administration play the "Blame Game" since they've taken office? Also, can you explain to me how a new administration in the White House can change something that took 8 eight years plus to create? I like Bewitched but, Obama doesn't look like a Warlock to me if you're looking for magic for the mess we're in. If, so, please give the world the magic spell so we can function again as a society.

Have you ever had a great idea--or two--that you were eager to act on, but you couldn't seem to get moving? It could have been an art project, a blog, a book. Whatever it was, the initial inspiration seemed so clear, and then? Mush. There are two big--and curable--reasons this happens, and neither of them has anything to do with the quality of the idea itself. That is, you don't usually get stuck because your idea is bad. You get stuck because you haven't made a decision or you don't have conditions of satisfaction. Decisions are powerful When you make a decision you choose to commit. You're saying, This is what I am going to do. This is what I am going to create." You can have a great idea, a wonderful, juicy, vivid idea, but until you decide to commit, it's just an idea. It doesn't matter how good an idea you think it is. It doesn't matter how much time you spend thinking about it. Until you decide to bring it to life, nada. What makes a decision a decision A decision is a decision when two things happen: You choose and you declare that you have chosen. Choose: The Latin root of decision means to cut off or cut away. And when you choose to do one thing, you are choosing not to do something else. You cut away some possibilities for the sake of the one you choose. Fear of letting go of other possibilities is one of the chief blocks to making a decision. But notice: If you try to keep all the possibilities open, you never follow through on any of them. To make your idea real, you're going to have to choose it over other ideas. Declare you have chosen: Language makes things happen. We declare things into existence, as when a minister declares, "I now pronounce you husband and wife." Your decision is complete when you put your choice into words and declare it to yourself and others. The declaring it to others piece is important. A declaration is incomplete until it is both spoken and heard. To put oomph behind your decision, get a witness. Now what? How vision gets fuzzy So you've made a choice and declared it, now what? Many an idea stalls at this point. The original vision gets surprisingly fuzzy. When you think about, you'll see it's natural for an idea to get fuzzy after you've decided to pursue it. For one thing, you may be a bit shy about the choice you've made. Can you really do this thing? Will it work? For another, bringing an idea to life usually involves a lot of moving parts. Many different things will need to be done at many different times. Right after you've made a decision, it's easy to be swamped by all the steps you might need to take. The simple brilliance you started with becomes quite confused. Restore focus with conditions of satisfaction You may have read about conditions of satisfaction in last week's article. Conditions of satisfaction describe what has to happen in order for you to be satisfied with the form your idea takes. They are tremendously helpful in getting beyond the vague, if inspired, vision you often have once you've made a decision. Once you have set conditions of satisfaction, it is much easier to see what needs to happen for your idea to take shape. Let's say you decide to start a blog. While it was still a sparkling idea, you felt quite inspired by the possibilities. Now that you've declared that you're going to do it, so many questions crowd your mind. What are you going to write about? How often should you post? How do you get people to read it? Before you start to answer those questions, stop. Check in with yourself and connect with your original reasons for choosing this idea. What has to happen for you to be satisfied with the blog you create? Sample conditions of satisfaction Here are conditions of satisfaction a nutritionist might write for a blog intended to attract prospective clients. In parentheses after each condition of satisfaction are standards for meeting that condition. Blogging has to fit into the time I have available and not compete with serving clients. (Standards: I'll spend at least two hours and no more than four hours a week working on the blog. No more than 20 minutes per week will be spent on technical stuff. If I can't solve something in 10 minutes, I'll get help.) I need to be able to keep up with twice weekly posts without tearing my hair out thinking up ideas. (Standards: 50% of my posts will be me talking about good nutrition in my own voice. The other 50% will be me pointing to other blog posts or resources on the Web and commenting on them.) Visitors have to feel like they've landed in a yummy place. (Standards: 75% of posts will have vivid photos of healthy food simply prepared. Colors will be bright, clear, and simple. My photo will show me smiling and in casual clothing.) The blog will attract new readers every month. (Standards: There will be a way for people to subscribe to the blog. I will spend at least an hour each week reading and commenting on related blogs. I will take an online course in Search Engine Optimization for blogs. I will announce new posts to the people on my mailing list once a week and ask them to tell their friends. I will tweet about new posts.) Notice that standards describe specifically what you will do--and when--to meet your conditions of satisfaction. It's also important the standards be something you can control by your own actions. If you live up to your standards, you declare yourself satisfied. Your great ideas don't need to be stalled by temporary fuzziness It's natural to go through a phase of fuzziness when you have a great idea. Your great idea will look a lot more possible after you've made a clear decision and created conditions of satisfaction. Photo credit: Zetson via flickr Under a Creative Commons License

Thanks again to Aaron Sorkin for sharing his insights in the making of SOCIAL NETWORK.  Compared to that a half hour episode of comedy seems a little minimal but that's what I got.

Saturday I posted another episode of ALMOST PERFECT, the series I co-created with David Isaacs and Robin Schiff for CBS in 1995 and 1996. I’d like to think of it as “Cancelled but Helpful to Young Writers”. Here’s how “Overly Meditated” came to be.

Our best stories were the ones that serviced our overall theme – how does a young woman juggle work and a relationship when both are fulltime jobs? If you’re writing a spec of an existing show first determine its theme. Does your story address it? If no then toss it.

Contrast within a relationship helps create conflict so we made Mike very down-to-earth and Kim a bit of a princess. That also gave Nancy Travis (Kim) something to play. We had been looking for a story that explored this dichotomy when one fell right into our lap.

Robin had dinner one night with a friend, a high-powered executive in the television industry. This woman had been to a meditation retreat, which we all found astounding considering “the Lifestyle of the Rich & Famous” was her blueprint for life. I think six people in the room came up with same idea at once. “What if Kim went to a weekend meditation retreat?”

When we settle on a premise the next thing we do is figure how to get the most bang for our buck. What are the funniest obstacles we can create?

In this case: It’s very Spartan. No creature comforts. It’s in the high desert so it’s freezing. There’s no electricity. Everyone has to eat macrobiotic mush. They all must do chores. There are two-hour breathing exercises. These all seemed good but they weren’t enough. We needed a couple of things that really tested Kim’s resolve and gave us plenty of room for fun. I don’t remember who in the room came up with what but ultimately we arrived at two great things: There’s no talking for 48 hours, and there are no bathrooms. She would have to use an outhouse. Knowing this character, those were the two most impossible tasks she could ever face in this situation.

The thrust of the story was Kim being put to a test. And again, your main character must want something; want it very badly. Kim HAD to survive this weekend, both for her own well-being and to prove to Mike that she wasn’t a princess.

So we had a character with a strong motivation, a funny venue to put her in – we were now ready to plot out the story.

We never minded if a story was simple as long as the subject matter seemed fresh. If you’re doing a spec, dazzle them with how well you write not how well you can plot SLUETH. A big question we had here was what to do with the other characters? Should we have a B-story with the writers? We tossed around a few and decided just to bag it. Once you went to the retreat we felt you’d want to stay there and not jump back and forth between stories. Also, we wanted to take our time with the retreat story and not have to jam things in quickly to accommodate a B-story. So this week the guys were light. The cast understood that if they had little to do one week we would make sure they were heavy the next. If you’re writing a spec 30 ROCK or MODERN FAMILY you can get buried trying to service everyone. If a side character or two is light so be it. Also, the best specs center their stories on the stars. If you’re writing a COMMUNITY, don’t do a big Shirley story and give Jeff four lines.

Okay, time to beat out the story.

We thought we’d open at the office and establish that Kim is super stressed. Drop the problem in right away. The reader doesn’t want to read eight pages before he knows what the dilemma is. We looked for a way to do that visually so Kim didn’t have to just say what her issue was. The neck brace is actually a call-back to a previous episode where she got a stiff neck making love to Mike in a car. So we got some jokes out of that. We felt we needed two steps to get her to the retreat. None of the guys would ever suggest such a thing. But they would recommend a chiropractor. They convince her to go and there’s a little twist at the end where we see they had an ulterior motive for getting her out of there.

Then it’s off to the chiropractor’s office. Our first question is always “what’s her attitude?” We decided to have her enter very apprehensive and once the chiropractor works on her she does a flip and suddenly loves it. We made the chiropractor very New Age. Even if you have guest roles in your spec take a few minutes and give them personalities. Once the chiropractor has proven himself Kim is very receptive to his suggestions. We keep underscoring that this stressful lifestyle she is living will lead to serious problems if she doesn’t address it.

But why a retreat? Why would a princess who wouldn’t dream of doing something like that agree to it? These are the questions we are always asking. “Why would she do this?” “Wouldn’t she do that instead?” Be tough on yourself here. The key was that she wanted the fastest possible solution. So one weekend instead of weekly classes and changing her diet was ideal. Even though she was warned. This was important. If she went there and was surprised it wasn’t a luxury spa she’d just leave. Better that she knew it was going to be rugged but embraced that (or so she thought).

Okay, so now we had to get Mike on board.

We go to Kim’s kitchen that night. He enters. She’s already eating healthy food. Her attitude is enthusiasm. His is dismissive. He has no time for some tree hugging bullshit. To convince him to go we wanted to avoid guilting him into it, or pleading, or Kim getting angry. We’ve seen that a billion times. Instead she uses a little cunning.

Now we go to retreat. Figure it’s a Friday night. Right from the get-go Kim is freezing. Mike is being the good soldier. When “Dave” (remember him from HEROES?) lays out the agenda Mike is suddenly amused. He’s going to enjoy watching Kim try to be silent and use an outhouse. This only strengthens her resolve. Now she wants to complete this weekend even MORE.

Not being able to speak also allowed us to do some silent bits, something you don’t often see on sitcoms.

After a quick dinner scene we move to their room. Mike no longer finds this fun. They’re both really uncomfortable. At this point we wanted to start putting pressure on Kim to crack. The couple in the next room is already breaking the rules. They’re making love, adding temptation. By the way, the offstage couple is me and Robin.

From there we go to a series of scenes showing the next day’s activities, looking for fun silent moments in each. And all the while building Kim’s frustration.

Things finally erupt back in their room that night. More temptation as the couple in the next room are not only having sex but they’re eating McDonalds. This escalates to a fight. Dave asks them to leave. Kim pleads to let them stay. She can do this. After only one minute of trying she bails. It seemed funny to have a character so committed giving up after one minute.

Back to Kim’s kitchen. Kim is mad. On the surface she’s angry with Mike but really she’s mad at herself for not being able to hack it. So when Mike disarms her by goofing on the weekend, she’s really just letting herself off the hook. We thought it would be funny and real to have them just break up over the experience. But there was a lot of discussion about this. We worried that it would look very self-congratulatory to have characters say how funny they thought elements of the show were. Ultimately, we went with it, arguing that it was such a universal reaction we could justify it. The laughing jag leads to a nice moment between them. We tried whenever we could to get at what the episode was really about and have them open up a little to each other.

David, Robin, and I wrote this over a long weekend but all the real heavy lifting had been done before we wrote FADE IN.

Good luck with your spec. Hopefully you’ll take from this discussion the need to really be tough on yourself… although I’m sure there will be a few who now write Liz Lemon goes to a meditation retreat spec 30 ROCK.

So, the tremendous conversation in the comments to Alison's post about how what you wear impacts how others perceive you got me thinking. Like it or not, what we wear does seem to impact how others perceive and even value us.

But, there's something more, something deeper that seems to be going on, too.

What we wear may change how others perceive us, at least in part, because it also changes how we act and interact with the world. It effects what goes on in our own internal psychic ecosphere.

And, I began to wonder...

How does what you wear impact what you create?

Legendary copywriter, John Carlton, tells the story of how he used to have a very specific outfit that he'd to wear to write copy. And, he had to wear the same thing every time, right down to his hat in order to get into that place where, as he says, he literally stalked and attacked his writing.

Could it really be that what you wear changes how you feel enough to impact what you create?

And, what about other factors like where you work, what your view is, how light or dark or loud or quiet it is. Do these things change your creative output, too? In my experience, everything from what I wear to where I am and what I eat have a pretty profound impact on my creative output.

These things form my Optimal Creative Modus Operandi (MO).

So, I thought it would be fun to do an experiment here and share our collective creative MOs. I'll start and I'd love for you to share yours in the comments.

Below is a short list of personal and environmental conditions that have an impact on my creative output, along with my preference for maximizing the flow of creative juices.

Here is my Optimal Creative MO:

• Clothes - Bare feet, old jeans and a well-worn t-shirt.
• Sound - Moderate background noise, classic rock, love writing to Led Zeppelin
• Light - Bright, sunny setting, preferably with sunlight on my face and body
• Time of Day - Early morning (5:30am), then again late in the evening.
• Location - Crunchy, low-key cafe, home-office or Soho House in NYC.
• Directionality - Facing out into a room with a wall or substantial piece of furniture at my back
• Routine/spontaneous - Routine, BUT provided I have an idea capture device
• Long periods or short bursts - 2 to 4 hour intensive creative sessions where time often fugues
• Carry something to capture ideas on the fly? - Always have a voice recorder or app on me
• Squeaky Clean or squalor (setting) - Squeaky clean
• Clean or dirty - Unshowered in the morning, showered at night and in the final weeks of writing a book, you probably don't wanna get too close to me, lol.
• Solo or surrounded - Solo, except when creating music, then collaborative
• Digital or analogue - Analogue to ideate, digital to flesh out and build out
• What fuels you? - Raw almonds, organic berries and ice-cold water
• Leaded or unleaded? - Leaded latte in the morning, nothing in the evening.
• Breaks - Getting outside between creative bouts, preferably by water or woods.
• Mindset practices that fuel creation - Meditation, playing guitar.
• Movement practices that fuel creation - Yoga, hiking, running, spinning

So, now it's your turn.

What's YOUR Creative Modus Operandi?

Copy and paste the below list into your comment then share YOUR creative M.O...

Clothes -
Sound -
Light -
Location -
Directionality -
Time of Day -
Routine/spontaneous -
Long periods or short bursts -
Carry something to capture ideas on the fly? -
Squeaky Clean or Squalor -
Clean or dirty -
Solo or surrounded -
Digital or analogue -
What fuels you? -
Leaded or unleaded? -
Breaks -
Mindset practices that fuel creation -
Movement practices that fuel creation -

Looking forward to discovering YOUR optimal creative MO...

Jonathan Fields is the author of Career Renegade: How to Make a Great Living Doing What You Love.  He writes and speaks on meaningful work, being a lifestyle entrepreneur and creativity at JonathanFields.com and is a twitter heavy-user at @jonathanfields

Compliance Kills Initiative

A compliance culture is old school. An initiative culture is new school. When it comes to job enjoyment, organizational morale, and increased productivity, new school is better than old school; initiative is better than compliance.

 

Compliance has to do with rules, regulations, policies, and procedures. These are not bad in and of themselves, but when they dominate and lead to the slow death of personal initiative, they are very much counter-productive and kill creativity and innovation, which are at the heart of any organization’s longevity.

 

We need both compliance and initiative. Top-down to keep vision and values in place and bottom-up to generate new ideas and solutions to vexing problems. Too much compliance kills imaginative initiative.

 

Here are a few thoughts on how, as a leader, you can keep healthy compliance, while at the same time creating and fostering a culture of initiative.

 

Creating & Fostering a Culture of Initiative

The following concepts are adapted from the magazine Bits and Pieces:.

 

The more freedom you give people to do their jobs the way they want, the more satisfaction they’ll get from their work. If leaders insist on doing all the thinking for their organizations, if everything has to be done their way, what’s left for the people who work for them to dream about and create?

Unfulfilled people can be just as serious a problem as ineffective methods.

How much personal satisfaction can there be in doing a job that is completely programmed, where your muscles or brain are used to perform repetitive operations already planned and dictated by someone else? There ought to be something in every role and job that is satisfying to the person who does it. Unfulfilled people can be just as serious a problem as ineffective methods.

 

Here are four ideas used by successful leaders:

 

 

1. Agree on the end results. Give people a clear idea of your expectations and the results you want to achieve. Leave the methods to them.
2. Suggest methods rather than dictate them, with the understanding that people are free to devise something better.
3. Consult people affected by a problem or a proposed change and ask their ideas, regardless of whether you think you need them or not.
4. Enrich jobs by delegating decisions and fostering initiative as far down the line as possible.

 

 

If a worker is capable of being trained to make a certain decision intelligently, why refer it to a supervisor?  If a supervisor is capable, why refer it to someone above?

 

Creating a climate of initiative and empowerment that gives people some independence, without losing control, takes a lot of leadership skill—but it’s worth it.

 

Setting up a new social media Center of Excellence sounds deceptively straightforward: gather experts, create materials/applications, distribute, and enforce. As the Center needs "valued" content, why not start there,  then figure out the other part later?

Strategically, what to focus on and where to invest

Firms that focus on commissioning content they’ll spring on employees later will quickly discover no amount of training material, content, guidance, applications, and processes developed by you or your agency in isolation will drive significant adoption.

Your true mission: Earning the opportunity to add value.

Be wonderful if this privilege came bundled with the “I’m in the Center of Excellence” sash/tiara kit, but disappointingly, as anyone who has done this successfully can confirm, it does not.

As again, success is beyond your domain, what you choose to tackle first matters a lot. A key element in earning the opportunity to add value is involving your target audience in the creation of said value, before you start.

A true strategy focuses on how the Center becomes a valued partner

How will you ensure you can share all the valuable content/applications you paid the agency to create? We’ll tell everyone it’s here, we’ll require every employee go through the training is a list of activities, not a strategy.

If agencies propose starting with content creation, assuming the CMO-given right to institute change will be powerful enough to make it happen, don’t rely on them for more than that. Before engaging the agency to produce content, I suggest you:

• Plan how you'll facilitate, coordinate and enable employees, and understand what you need from the various constituencies
• Collaborate with representatives from the various divisions/departments and invite them to help define how to best move forward

You may be wondering how that will work. After all, they don’t know much about social media, or have as much experience as we do. Perhaps not, but they do understand what they need and what their priorities are - and they value being asked. I'll share an example as to how and why this works.

As an interactive marketing manager years back, I decided to create an animated sales enablement piece. Our sales teams needed to explain a large set of new technical features. Rather that start with an agency brief, marketing's knee-jerk response, I started by interviewing internal and external sales teams. I quickly learned sales teams don’t care for, nor use, interactive animations. Deflating, to say the least. Rather than go away, I asked why.

They explained having to sit through extraneous details bored prospects. As they customize most of their presentations, something they couldn’t modify was of limited use. We came up with a solution: creating interactive 'micro' animations that could be embedded in their presentations and used together or apart. We also set up brief ongoing meetings with some sales team members so they could review our progress. End result: the sales team loved them, and our investment made a real difference.

Did they know anything about animation or the topic at hand? No, but it was very first time anyone on the marketing side had asked them beforehand and let them have a say during the process. This is not to be confused with merely gathering pre-project input. As they 1) had a say as to whether we should make the investment and 2) were involved throughout, it was ‘their’ piece – they sold their fellow sales colleagues. The point: giving up control and giving outsiders a real vote from the start helps ensure adoption.

If you are working with an agency or consultant, beyond creating the Center of Excellence content you requested, make sure they’ve outlined how the Center will ensure adoption, or define that yourself before hiring them. If not, be afraid. Be very afraid. Second chances in this particular arena are very difficult to come by. You need to get it right the first time out.

Read Part 1 and Part 2 of this five-part series.

Next: How successful centers position themselves and operate.

Like culture, all companies deliver a Customer Experience. Also like culture, it isn’t always what the company intended. It is often a poor customer experience.

Does your company deliver the promised customer experience? Do you have a document outlining what the Customer Experience is supposed to be?, No, Thats not surprising, few companies do. And all of us who don’t have a Customer Experience model in place are in good company. According to a recent Forresters’ report while 90% of executives said that the customer experience was very important or critical, only 11% consider themselves to be very disciplined in their approach to customer experience.
Let’s look at an interaction with a call center from the customers’ perspective



As you can see from the above illustration the customer expectations and emotions rise and fall as the call progresses. All of us who have listened, monitored or taken live calls know this to be true. What are the ‘pain points’ on the call we looked at earlier?
• Service Level – waiting too long to get the call answered,
• “Unexpectedly high call volume” – unexpected volume or poor forecasting/scheduling,
• Policies etc.

At all of the key points during the call the agent has an opportunity to support the brand messages and to meet the customer expectations or not. Of course it is far simple to suggest that the agent could have done x or y. The truth of the matter is that it is the company that makes the decisions that impact the service delivery.

The agent can really only work within the parameters the company sets out. It is the company that determines the grade of service that they want the call center to meet. It is the company through the center management that forecasts the calls and contact volumes and sets the schedules for the number of agents on shift. It is the company that establishes policies and procedures that the agents must adhere too.

Now let’s not place on the blame on the call center and its management solely. It is the marketing group that creates and sends the messages that create the customer expectations which leads the customer to place calls into the call center with these expectations.

So how can we ensure that your customers receive the experience we would like them to have? An experience that builds loyalty; An experience that supports repurchase; An experience that reduces customer churn and attrition.
Before starting to architect the Customer Experience, let’s start by defining it
The key elements of any Customer Experience related to the contact center has to include:

1. The ease of access – to information, to purchase, to inquire, to complain or to fix a problem,
2. The speed of access – Service level, hoops customers have to jump through – how many times do they have to enter their account number etc. time to return an email or resolve a trouble ticket?
3. The quality of interaction- Where they able to get done what they wanted too? Was it easy, was it efficient, logical?
Customer Experience is the experience that a customer has when interacting with a company. This includes how they chose to interact with us and how easy it is for them to complete the interaction.

IBM defines Customer Experience as “The designed interaction between a customer and your organization”. The key element of this definition is the design element. The message here is regardless what your customer experience is and regardless whether it is good or bad, it is what you have designed through your actions, processes and procedures.

Before starting to architect the Customer Experience, let’s start by defining it
The key elements of any Customer Experience related to the contact center has to include:

1. The ease of access – to information, to purchase, to inquire, to complain or to fix a problem,
2. The speed of access – Service level, hoops customers have to jump through – how many times do they have to enter their account number etc. time to return an email or resolve a trouble ticket?
3. The quality of interaction- Where they able to get done what they wanted too? Was it easy, was it efficient, logical?
Customer Experience is the experience that a customer has when interacting with a company. This includes how they chose to interact with us and how easy it is for them to complete the interaction.

IBM defines Customer Experience as “The designed interaction between a customer and your organization”. The key element of this definition is the design element. The message here is regardless what your customer experience is and regardless whether it is good or bad, it is what you have designed through your actions, processes and procedures.
With this definition in hand can now look at how we can design our desired customer experience.

To do this we need to start at the beginning. Few companies today are looking at the customer experience holistically. For those that do consider the question of Customer Experience, it is often only a marketing concept…how should our stores, marketing and advertising look and feel to support the brand.
The call centre is generally not connected organizationally to Marketing and most often resides under Operations or Sales. This distance between silos can mean that the Marketing group has little understanding of what takes place in the call center. This despite the fact that centers are the single most common communications channel an organization can have with its customers. Purdue University found that 92% of customers judge an organization based upon the interactions they have with a company’s call center.

So how can we as call center executives join the dots between the desired customer experience and customer satisfaction to deliver the result through our call centers? Like with any travel, once you have a destination in mind you can then develop a roadmap to get you to where you are going.
But we have a few challenges in developing a roadmap…For one thing we do not know where we are starting from.
We know that most companies have not defined and documented their customer experience. So how can we expect to know where we are at now and how we are doing?

The first step in our process is to assess and determine where we are now; we need to understand what the customer experience is today.

First, we need an inventory of the channels, methods and touch-points through which our customers interact with us: phone, email, chat, mail, in-store etc. Do all of the touch-points end in a common single CRM that tracks each ’touch’ the company has with their customers? What about marketing initiatives: email blasts, SMS, print media, daily specials, white mail, etc.
Second, we need to analyze the customer satisfaction metrics (CSAT) and reports we have in place for each of these channels. You are not alone if you don’t have metrics to report on all of these channels; – this is the first step you will need to complete! On what channels do you measure CSAT, and where is it not measured?

Let’s examine the channels where no CSAT measurement is taking place. Is this because a conscious decision has been made not to measure it? Have we determined that we can’t measure it? Has it been determined to be unimportant or has the idea of measuring CSAT on this channel not been considered? Remember that old management tenet, “you can manage what you can’t measure’.
With your CSAT data in-hand, ask yourself is the data comparable? Are you asking the same question for each channel or do you ask different or somewhat different questions? If you are asking about satisfaction with the company or brand on one survey and asking if they were satisfied with their last call center interaction or agent, you are asking two separate and distinct questions. Unless the questions are the same you can’t aggregate the results. So if you are not asking the same questions then you have your second take away.

With comparable data you can chart the CSAT across all communication channels. Look at the results and what do you see…If you are like the majority of organizations you see a much lower level of satisfaction than we would like to see… almost two thirds of 15 verticals surveyed had a customer experience average scores of 70% or less.

The CSAT score is the customers’ opinion of the service interaction quality for the interaction they have just completed. In the same way our internal quality assessment scores are our satisfaction with our agents being able to address all of the elements that we think should be important to both the customer and the company. In the vast majority of organizations these two assessments measure two distinct elements. They are not the same.

Sad or not the scores that our customers have given us are their opinions of the service we provide. This is the customer experience we have now. This is the result of the service model we have designed and put into place.

The last step in defining the current customer experience is to look at what messages we are providing to our customers and prospects. To gain an understanding of what these messages are look at the company Mission Statement and Company Values…are you speaking of ‘World Class Customer Service’ or ‘Committed to quality’ or satisfaction or customers are a priority etc.
Keep in mind that it has been said that the accuracy of a Mission Statement is inversely proportional to its length. That is to say that the longer the mission statement the less likely it is to be true, or realised to be true. It has also been said that “If the mission statement doesn’t fit on a T shirt, it’s too long.”

Next meet with the Marketing people and review their current marketing campaigns and messages…do the company mission/value/vision statement and the marketing messages match the customer experience we are delivering?

It is important that when examining the marketing and brand messages that we see the emotional aspect to most messages. People make decisions on emotion – then rationalize with intellect. What this means is how the messages make them feel has a great deal to do with how a customer will feel about a brand, a product or a service interaction. In call and contact centers we often focus narrowly on what can and can’t be said. Maya Angelou said “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said. People will forget what you did. But people will never forget how you made them feel.”

This can be a two edged sword. If our advertising and marketing make them feel warm and fuzzy about our brand and products. This is good and will be remembered. Many centers employ scripts or provide little latitude to empower the agents to make decisions to satisfy customers. Customers are also likely to remember how angry, frustrated, stressed and unhappy interacting with the call center made them feel. In too many organizations the Marketing department and the call center are working in opposite directions even though the success of the company is their shared objective.



In the diagram above we can see the shift from the promise that Marketing makes to product delivery and the service supported by the call center. When considered in terms of how a customer perception is shaped the excitement or anticipation starts high and often degrades with the reality of delivery and after sales service.

Let’s look at a hypothetical organization with the following Mission Statement;
“To deliver World Class Customer Service to our Customers, by providing access to our products and services the way our customers want them, when they want them, while providing a positive, enjoyable and productive environment to our employees and delivering superior returns to our Shareholders”

From this Mission Statement we can see what the company values:
• World Class Customer Service,
• Unfettered access to products/services- based on time and based on channel,
• A productive, enjoyable and positive environment for staff,
• Superior returns for Shareholders

As we continue down the process we have set out a few minutes ago we would then meet with Marketing to discover the attributes of the Brand. The following is a reasonable set of attributes associated with our hypothetical brand;
Accessible,
Cares about Customers,
Daring,
Different,
Energy,
Fun,
Glamorous,
Stylish,
Trendy,
Youthful,

By looking again at the original emotional call flow we reviewed earlier we can now match the experience to the desired Brand attributes



With the ‘current state’ of our Customer Experience picture in hand, we can next look to the experience we wish to create.
Do the Mission/Vision/Value and Marketing messages support the Customer Experience we want to create?

What descriptions and phases would we use to define this experience?

What descriptions would our customers use to define this experience?

Now describe how we want a customer to feel following an interaction?

The answers to these questions become the starting point of aligning the contact center with the brand message.
We are now equipped with a number of building blocks that we will need to develop our customer experience roadmap.
Look at complaints. Map the processes required to support delivery of desire customer experiences. Identify policies and procedures that are in opposition to the identified customer experience descriptors? Identify all processes, policies and procedures that are not aligned with the desired Customer Experience and raise these with management for discussion, review and revision.

To summarize the steps in designing a Customer Experience Roadmap are as follows;
1. Know what the current experience is,
2. Know how you are measuring the experience,
3. Understand your policies, processes and any negative customer impacts,
4. Plan changes and tests,
5. Measure improvements/reductions as a result of tests,
6. Roll out positive changes and continue other tests,
Or displayed graphically



About The Taylor Reach Group, Inc.
The Taylor Reach Group, Inc. takes a ‘hands-on’ holistic approach to improving customer interaction, customer experience and call/contact center strategies. Our consulting services examine every aspect of the call/contact center interaction process. 150+ years of award winning contact center industry experience. Proven results, guaranteed ROI. 14,000+ agent positions globally employ TRG designed operational models.

For more information on our Customer Experience and Call Center consulting services pleaqse email info@thetaylorreachgroup.com

I think about trash. A lot. Every time I struggle down the stairs of my fourth-floor walk-up with yet another heavy, seams-bulging sack of garbage, the weight of the bag equal only to the pull on my valiant, striving-to-be-environmentally-mindful soul. I try to recycle as much as I can, but it's tough; throwing a few bottles in another plastic bag hardly appears to make a difference. Trash just seems to be an unpleasant reality that has existed for all times and, if anything, its true purpose is that of a cultural barometer on what was deemed disposable, meaningless or lost in a particular time. As someone who routinely attends estate sales and trawls thrift stores, it's amazing to draw conclusions based on the remains of a life tossed aside without context. ("Jeans with tassels on the front. Obviously into country music.")

Today I'm sharing an excerpt from a recent Believer interview with Professor Robin Nagle, the anthropologist-in-residence at New York City’s Department of Sanitation. Her thoughts on the ephemeral nature of "owning" anything really resonated with me, particularly the idea of object nihilism: that "every single thing you see is future trash. Everything." She hopes to ultimately form a Museum of Sanitation in New York. 

On to Alex Carp's interview. Read the original post in its entirety here.

Indigestible stomach contents of baby albatross. Photographed by Chris Jordan.

 

Photo by Roadchubbs on Flickr

 

Excerpted with permission from The Believer. Read the original post in its entirety here.

What will live on after you're gone? What's the cultural significance of what you create? Let's discuss in the comments.

More Earth Tones Posts | Items Tagged "Trash" | More Philosophy Posts

French guitarist Richard Pinhas is no stranger to groundbreaking musicianship. In the 1970s, he played guitar for the influential band Heldon before breaking away from the traditional format. The result has been thirty years of collaborations and solo efforts that push the envelope of what a guitar album can sound like. His most recent release, Metal/Crystal contains dizzying, swirling guitar melodies, but also hissing, hypnotic drone that threatens to overwhelm the listener with its weight. It's alternately very dark and very freeing; the result of two years of tragedy for Pinhas.

Pinhas will be playing a set at tonight's Sonic Circuits event at the Maison Francaise with another influential international noisemaker: Merzbow. Beginning in Baltimore on the 29th, Pinhas will begin a mini-tour up the East Coast with one of America's premier experimental acts: Wolf Eyes. We got a chance to talk to Pinhas about philosophy, working with international collaborators and the influences for Metal/Crystal, out on Silver Spring-based Cuneiform Records.

Had you heard of Sonic Circuits before you were invited to play the festival?

To be honest, I just heard about it when we played a couple of times in Washington in some clubs. Last time, people told me about this circuit and the work of Jeff. Then Jeff contacted me one year ago to make a proposition to get with Merzbow after the double CD we made together and I'd say it was pretty hard because Masami, which is the real name of Merzbow, doesn't want to move to much because he's got animals and he said it's a long trip. Which I can understand because coming from Tokyo is a very long way and at the end, Jeff gets Masami, so it was perfect.

Have you gotten to see any of the other acts during the festival, so far? [Ed. note: this interview was conducted on Wednesday morning.]

I got to see the concert with Fennesz and it was marvelous. Really marvelous. It was the first time I saw him live. I have heard about him since a long time but you know, everyone is touring everywhere and sometimes it's very hard to see people.

Is this your first time to the States?

It's a great country. I love America. I come every year, or two times a year, or for holidays and we were here last June.

Where have you enjoyed staying?

The city that I love the most is of course, Manhattan, but it's too expensive, so I never committed to live there. It's the only one I know that's more expensive than Paris! But the ones I love are Chicago, San Francisco, Seattle and Detroit.

Some of the people that you've collaborated with on Metal/Crystal are former bandmates and other countrymen that you've worked with before. How did you arrange working with international collaborators like Merzbow and Wolf Eyes?

Oh, it was easy! I went to Tokyo a couple of times for touring or concerts and we took some days with Masami to work and record. Then we played and recorded live with Masami in Tokyo, in Paris, in New York, in other places I cannot remember. So, we have a lot of material that I use to put together. And the guys from Wolf Eyes I saw in Paris. Duncan, my son, played with them and we talk a lot about what they do. So I hear what Wolf Eyes does and I saw them a couple of times in Paris playing. So they make an opening show for us in Detroit, and they organized the show when we played there which was 2007 or 2009. Then we get friends and when they know that I come in for the festival, they ask me if it's okay to do concerts with them. So we're going to do some recording in Baltimore on the 28th and start a mini-tour the 29th. We're going to play in Baltimore, in New York and in Boston.

Will your live sets be entirely from Metal/Crystal?

No. In D.C., it will be the work with Masami, so it will be very close to Keio Line and the one we just released, Metal/Crystal. But with Wolf Eyes, they include me in the band. So it will be a mix of what makes Wolf Eyes and what I do. I don't know yet what we're doing, but they are great musicians, so it's no problem to work one night and converse after. It's not very often, like all musicians, you're invited and it's really to get in the band in a few minutes if you have the same feel as the band. Just having an idea, a good song and when you know that your song is near from their song then things go very fast.

It sounds like there were some unfortunate events in your personal life that inspired the writing on Metal/Crystal.

I had two big problems two years ago, but is that very important? My young brother died in thirteen days from cancer and my girlfriend had a suicide attempt at the same time, so it was very hard to record for this, so I take two years to do the Metal/Crystal album. At the end, the art is broke and I had to re-put together in three weeks.

What was the thought process behind your titling for Metal/Crystal, where you combine the desperate emotions like Hysteria or Paranoia with the name of a metal?

I've always been involved in philosophy. I've done a Ph.D., I've been chair at a university one year in Paris, and I stopped because the first album went good and I decided to be a professional musician. So, I've always been interested in philosophy. I wrote a couple of books and it's my hobby. Well, not my hobby, it's as important as music, but I try to make my living with music and it stays a hobby. But I spend two or three hours everyday to work on this. And in philosophy there is a sub-title that is psychiatry and all the mental ills are very interesting because they give a good idea of what is regular or normality in the other where there is no normality unless you try to import it from external side. I tried to use mental illness that I know from me or from other people so I can have a good idea of this. Some friends are really paranoid, some other ones are really schizoid so I think it was time to do something about this.

Do you have a philosophy about your approach to the music you make and the sounds that you're trying to create?

Of course, I think that all the music is in relationship with the concept of time, repetition, difference. I work a lot about the concept of time.

In our call center consulting practice we often assist call centers understand and rationaize their Customer Experience strategy. This includes aligning the call center operational model with the desired Customer Experience.

In this third article in our Customer Experience (click to view Part 1 and Part 2 )and the Call Center series we examine how that alignment process can actually operate.



In the diagram above we can see the shift from the promise that Marketing makes to product delivery and the service supported by the call center. When considered in terms of how a customer perception is shaped the excitement or anticipation starts high and often degrades with the reality of delivery and after sales service.
Let’s look at a hypothetical organization with the following Mission Statement;
“To deliver World Class Customer Service to our Customers, by providing access to our products and services the way our customers want them, when they want them, while providing a positive, enjoyable and productive environment to our employees and delivering superior returns to our Shareholders”
From this Mission Statement we can see what the company values:
• World Class Customer Service,
• Unfettered access to products/services- based on time and based on channel,
• A productive, enjoyable and positive environment for staff,
• Superior returns for Shareholders
As we continue down the process we have set out a few minutes ago we would then meet with Marketing to discover the attributes of the Brand. The following is a reasonable set of attributes associated with our hypothetical brand;
Accessible,
Cares about Customers,
Daring,
Different,
Energy,
Fun,
Glamorous,
Stylish,
Trendy,
Youthful,

By looking again at the original emotional call flow we reviewed earlier we can now match the experience to the desired Brand attributes



With the ‘current state’ of our Customer Experience picture in hand, we can next look to the experience we wish to create.
Do the Mission/Vision/Value and Marketing messages support the Customer Experience we want to create?

What descriptions and phases would we use to define this experience?

What descriptions would our customers use to define this experience?

Now describe how we want a customer to feel following an interaction?

The answers to these questions become the starting point of aligning the contact center with the brand message.
We are now equipped with a number of building blocks that we will need to develop our customer experience roadmap.
Look at complaints. Map the processes required to support delivery of desire customer experiences. Identify policies and procedures that are in opposition to the identified customer experience descriptors? Identify all processes, policies and procedures that are not aligned with the desired Customer Experience and raise these with management for discussion, review and revision.

To summarize the steps in designing a Customer Experience Roadmap are as follows;
1. Know what the current experience is,
2. Know how you are measuring the experience,
3. Understand your policies, processes and any negative customer impacts,
4. Plan changes and tests,
5. Measure improvements/reductions as a result of tests,
6. Roll out positive changes and continue other tests,
Or displayed graphically



We would welcome your comments, suggestions or questions regarding this post, Please share

Then, when I was down (always), I listened to the Smiths.

By the time I got to him, he was already recording as Morrissey, even though I prided myself on having been one of the earliest in my area to have latched onto him as a cult idol. I liked Morrissey, but I loved The Smiths. The Queen Is Dead was my favorite album, though I had all of the albums and I had favorite songs on all of them. I collected them, and was so proud when I went to France at 16 and found an album with a few unknown B-sides on it. After some years a few other, more popular people started liking the Smiths, too, and this kind of lessened both the love affair and the utility of the band for me. Still, I remember specifically a time in which I was able to recite the lyrics to “I Know It’s Over” without irony or self-consciousness to my own mother. Depression of that brand must be the specific luxury of the privileged late capitalist American suburban white teenager: perhaps it will someday be listed as having been a diagnostic criteria that an early penchant for music produced by emigrants from Manchester, England, suggests a dependency upon anti-depressants later in life?

++++++++++++++++

Now, the fact is that life must go on, even in the midst of a funk. I do not have time for the histrionics. And besides, the peculiar alchemy of aging, parenthood, and medication has taught me to stomach it, soldiering on and setting my life to a soundtrack of slightly more upbeat music — The Killers, Arcade Fire, obscure alternative band one- or two-hit wonders they play on KROQ like Silent Film or Phoenix.

We take Mini to Disneyland. It is the happiest place on earth. But it is not like they are checking serotonin levels at the gate or anything.

I hold his little hand in mine, noting the way he grips and regrips my hand, almost like from one second to the next, he is thinking about letting go and then thinking better of it, as he confronts new things and deciding whether or not he can trust them. I relearn the world, get a second chance to enjoy things like Tom Sawyer Island and the Winnie the Pooh ride because he does. I start to think of my life as lucky because he is in it. We run in search of treasure, and when we get to the giant piles of painted metal and artificial wood, he says, “But Mommy, this isn’t real treasure,” and he’s right, of course, but he’s also only three, and isn’t there something to be said for believing in the magic, even if it’s only for just a little while?

I am at once so proud of him and terrified for him. His life is his own, but its secondary purpose to me is an experiment: what would happen if I had had a different kind of childhood? What would happen if I had been born a boy? Would it have been all the difference? When the time comes, will I be able to hide the fact that I’m waiting, hoping, praying, that some kind of depressive time bomb doesn’t go off in him?

What if I come home one day, and he is singing to me the words to I Know It’s Over? What if he never does?

+++++++++

Sometime in the early 2000s, Morrissey moved to the Hollywood Hills. The first album he wrote here, You Are The Quarry, has a very Los Angeles feel to it, but it is a special Los Angeles — the Los Angeles that you only have access to for the first few years that you are here. When Los Angeles is new and still magical, before the traffic becomes tedious and the stories-high billboards fade into the background like they have decades before for the rest of us. It was his last good album. There was a time when somebody told me that Morrissey had been surprised, after living in Los Angeles for a while, that he found himself becoming, finally, happy. It was as if he realized that his career, all along, had been built upon Seasonal Affective Disorder brought upon by gloomy British weather. Now he was an ostensibly happy British expat in his fifties, hanging out at the Cat & Fiddle with Courtney Love and Michael Stipe, still weird, but not depressed. His music suffered, but he didn’t want to destroy himself anymore, so maybe it was a fair trade?

Can you be happy and still create?

This was something I wondered back when I first thought about going on medication at 19. I had worried that my voice was somehow tied to my depression. At that age, it probably was. But that was not necessarily a good thing.

Depression is in love with itself, convinced of its own beauty and sure that it is infinitely fascinating to everyone with whom it comes into contact. As I’ve gotten older I’ve finally started to realize how really boring and commonplace depression is — wherever you go, it is the same. It’s not special, despite what it will tell you, or what people who have it will sometimes try to convince you. I don’t know why we do that, unless it is because we have clung hard to this idea that there is some kind of heroism in a chemical imbalance. When really, it’s just a jumble of numbers, the luck of the draw: something that might have been solved with just a few different factors, or just more time in the sun.

We all try to avoid it as much as possible, yet still, it happens from time to time. Some of your employees treated their customers badly. Or they were caught abusing customers. Or their training was not up to date… However subtle the incident is, when it gets out in the news, you probably have an [...]

 

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[In his latest interview for GameSetWatch, writer and GSW correspondent Mike Rose talks to indie game creator Stephen 'Increpare' Lavelle about both his intriguing games and plans for future titles.]

Stephen Lavelle is a prolific indie developer who goes by the pseudonym Increpare. He is well-known in the indie community for churning out games thick and fast and exploring a wide range of concepts and game mechanics.

Of his 100+ games, highlights include triptych, Signifier, Opera Omnia and Whale of Noise. The subjects of his work range from side-scrolling shmups to exploration experiences, and many of his releases are rather NSFW.

In a recent interview, we talked to Stephen about his minimalistic style, why he got into game development, and why his job changes

Hi Increpare. Tell us a little about yourself and what you do.

My name is Stephen and I make games.

Why did you choose to go by the pseudonym Increpare?

I used to have a thing for the composer Charles-Valentin Alkan, and he wrote a piece called Increpatio. I chose that as a pseudonym when I was wandering around music fora, and modified it slightly when I decided to set up an account on an indie games forum (TIGSource).

When did you start making games, and what led you to do so?

I started making games a while back. There was a copy of Delphi (a programming IDE) that was given away free on the cover disk of a magazine. It took a year or two before I figured out how to do anything other than database programming with it. Then I made some other games.

None of 'em are on the internet now. The stuff I have on my site now is all from when I was in college.

Over the last few years, you've released over 100 games. Do you have any favourites?

Nope.

Your games are usually graphically minimalistic, and even your website is monochrome and bare in style. Is it that you'd rather focus on the game's concept over creating 'real' graphics, or do you simply not see yourself as a good artist?

I try to find an aesthetic I find acceptable - I've been working on the design of my website for years now, though usually when I come to change it I end up removing things rather than adding things. I think that at some point my internal organs that mediate sexy-website desires must have atrophied.

A fair few of your games take quite disturbing turns, featuring subjects such as sexual fetishes and nudity. Is your goal with these particular releases to shock the audience, or do these ideas feel no different to anything else you create?

You're such a prude! They do feel different to other ideas, and it can be difficult to work with them, but I've no goals as such.

You've collaborated with the likes of Terry Cavanagh and Hayden Scott-Baron in the past. Do you enjoy working on your own rather than with other people?

If I was faced with the choice of always working alone vs always collaborating I would unhesitatingly go with the former rather than the latter. I do really appreciate working in the company of other people, though. That's why I'm looking forward to moving down to Cambridge and getting together with some more people.

You recently made a post on your site announcing that you'd been made redundant from your job, and asking for people to make donations. Have you had a good response from your followers and fellow developers?

So far yes, people have been pretty good (developers and non-developers). I'm not going to become a wealthy man off of it, nor do I even expect to be able to subsist on donations, but even from what I have already I know that I'm going to have a much easier time getting started in Cambridge thanks to the contributions that people have made. That makes me really happy.

You said in a comment on the IndieGames blog last year that "I don't make money off my stuff, and I don't want to". With your current situation, are you now considering a future in charging for your games?

I'm not actively considering it. I don't think my desire to make games would survive the transition.

Do you have any big plans for your future game development-wise, or will you continue to build your concepts on the fly?

I hope I can get some time to sit down and consider what the hell I'm doing games-wise. I don't feel like I've had a moment to stop and think for over a year. I've just been working on things.

I'm looking forward to being able to do that, if only for a couple of days. For now, though, I'm caught up in trying to tie up loose ends here. Once I'm done here, I can start making games afresh.

You're one of the millions of people watching online video. Your company has a great story to share that would work on a visual medium. You’re eager to get started creating video for your website, blog or social media channels.

But you also:

1. Don’t have the time
2. Don’t have a large budget
3. Don’t have an internal video department

You’re not alone, and you’re more capable than you may know when it comes to managing a video project.

PR 20/20 recently launched its first self-produced video series, "Driven by Content," to educate our audiences on the emerging area of content marketing, as well as to document our methdology and activities.

By calling on the fundamental strategic planning and project management tactics that we employ for other creative projects, we were able to put together an engaging video series that was designed for our target audiences.

The Rationale

We wanted to make a program that was informative and incorporated several different types of online video features that clients may connect with, like interviews, scripted material, graphics and presentations.

We also experienced many of the challenges that our clients face when incorporating web video in their content marketing strategy, including: limited resources, tight taping schedules, short deadlines for delivery, coordinating a team of professionals new to video, and managing the creative approval process.

The idea was to help marketers work through the barriers to getting started in online video, assemble a team of internal champions and video professionals, and produce and publish videos that support inbound marketing goals.

The Methodology

The following is a practical methodology to creating a web video, and includes questions for you to start thinking about for your organization, and PR 20/20 notes from self-producing our own project in the "Driven by Content Snapshot." So take five and read on for more. 

Step 1. Create Your Concept

Questions to Get You Started:

• What story do we want to tell?
• What audiences do we want to reach?
• What messages do we want to communicate?
• What calls to action do we want to include?
• What goals do we want to accomplish? (Lead generation, brand awareness, customer loyalty)
• Where will we publish the video online?
• What type of video do we want to create?
  
• What format and length?

Christina and Christy discuss script changes for Part 5 of Driven by Content.

Driven by Content Snapshot

PR 20/20 is focused on content marketing for our clients as part of an integrated, inbound marketing campaign. However, as a newer concept, with many dynamics, we saw a need in the market to introduce content marketing to the masses at a 101 level, and cover the basics of what needs to be considered when investing in content projects.

With video consumption on the rise, we chose this medium, combined with accompanying blog posts, to publish the information in a strategically sequenced, five-part series.

We wanted to create simple videos that used a personal, interview-style approach, and keep the length shorter without sacrificing quality. This possibly meant that some of the videos would be longer than others, based on the subject matter’s complexity. As our agency relies on the strength of our team, with a wide base of knowledge and content marketing experience, we chose to involve five of our consultants as guests, each with their niche area to discuss in detail.

Step 2. Build Your Team

Questions to Get You Started:

• Who will internally champion the project?
• Who will be recruited to participate in the video project? (Employees, customers, partners, etc.)
• What technologies and aptitudes do we have internally for capturing, editing and publishing web video?
• What areas will we need to outsource to professional videographers, editors, etc.? And, where do we turn?

Keith readies the camera for our first taping.

Driven by Content Snapshot

Through a quick analysis of our human resources, we uncovered some untapped talents and background experience in video production and editing, including someone to write the script and host the series, and others to handle the technical details and production assistance. We used our agency’s Kodak Zi8 Pocket Video camera for capturing footage and iMovie for the Mac for editing.

PR 20/20 has connected with several professional video providers that specialize in web video and more sophisticated corporate video projects. However, with time and budgets in mind, we worked with what we had internally. Also, the nature of the videos lent itself to a more raw and simple final product, which could be easily edited and shared. While we sacrificed some in the way of production quality, we were able to focus on the content matter, and control the full creative process.

For more significant video projects, or if you don’t have internal capabilities, it’s important to connect with video providers that understand the full picture of production, publishing, distribution and optimization. It starts with going back to your goals of the video, and investing the time and resources in projects that have the greatest potential for impact.

Step 3. Work out the Details

Questions to Get You Started:

• When and where will we be capturing the videos?
• What scheduling steps do we need to take?
• How much lead time do people need that are involved?
• What preparation or training needs to be worked on with video participants, both from a lead role and support aspect?
• What backdrop, lighting, sound and wardrobe do we need?
• Is this scripted, off-the-cuff, or a combination?
• Are there graphics, audio or other important elements we want to include?

Driven by Content Snapshot

Our team worked together to figure out the details: creating a set and backdrop to tape the segments; coordinating shooting schedules that worked for the individuals involved; facilitating early prep with scripts, and full rehearsals to polish the segments; conducting test shoots with the video-capturing and editing equipment we had at our disposal; and the gathering and planning for visuals and other editing features we wanted from our editor.

Step 4. Produce

Questions to get you Started:

• Who can internally tape the videos and assist with production?
• What is our process for the taping? Are there natural pauses or breaks in the script/segment where we can cut? Or is it all in one take, and will we need to capture multiple takes to get it right?
• Who will be in charge of the direction of all involved, quality control of the shoot and be accountable for success?
• How do we keep people motivated during what can be a long process, and remove the frustration and/or jitters associated with being taped?
• Who has creative license and the decision-making power to authorize changes during the editing process, including final approval of the videos?

Action! Taping Part 3: Content & SEO.

Driven by Content Snapshot

PR 20/20 had all hands on deck for the production days, making it a fun and challenging team-building activity. When time permitted, associates lent a hand listening and watching the production with the script in hand for quality control, manning the background presentation, setting up the stage each taping day and of course, serving as the on-camera personalities.

The team effort allowed us the ability to shoot all five segments, including introductions, in one work week, squeezing in taping hours during our busy workloads. We also teamed up to create content for the accompanying blog posts. The director had final say on the deliverable videos, as well as review and approval of the accompanying blog posts and promotion strategy.

Step 5. Publish

Questions to Get You Started:

• Where will the videos be published?
• How will the videos be linked or embedded to our site, blog or social media?
• How will the videos be optimized?
• How will we promote these videos?
• What metrics (quantitative and qualitative) will we use to evaluate the success of the videos?

Driven by Content Snapshot

Due to the nature of the videos, and goal to distribute through the social web, we hosted the videos on a newly created YouTube channel, and embedded the videos in PR 20/20 blog posts. We then posted a blog article each day with the video, for five days in a row, launching the series one video at a time. The videos were shared to blog subscribers, and also through social media channels like Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. 

The PR 20/20 Driven by Content contributors.

That's a Wrap

While the success of the videos can be measured in video views, and the educational uses for clients and prospects in the areas of content marketing, there were also inherent benefits in coming together as a team, and challenging ourselves to create a product that delivers value to the audiences we serve. This is the bread and butter of content marketing, and we look forward to the next phase of video for PR 20/20.

Resources:

• Driven by Content 5-Part Video Series
• comScore's July 2010 U.S. Online Video Rankings
• PR 20/20's YouTube channel
• PR 20/20 Content Marketing Blog Posts

Christina is an assistant vice president and consultant for PR 20/20, a Cleveland-based inbound marketing agency and PR firm. Follow her on Twitter: @ChristinaCS

 

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By Jerry Del Colliano

(With my niece, Jaime MacEwen, left, and daughter Daria at Long Beach Island)

A recent article in The New York Times was a fascinating study of what happened when a group of scientists took off for the Grand Canyon without their mobile devices for an analog vacation.

Cell phones did not work. There was no Internet access. This trip was an unscientific beginning to what I believe is going to be required research in the future on how heavy use of digital devices and other technology affects our brains.

There were five scientists in the group – some believers and some skeptics, as the article pointed out.

What they were searching for is the answer to the question, does heavy technology use inhibit deep thought and cause anxiety? Can getting away from being connected – such as camping out in the Grand Canyon – help?

There is no doubt in my mind observing young students at USC that depriving them of mobile connectivity causes extreme anxiety. Young people often sleep with their phones, waking up to respond to text messages at times and then returning to sleep even if that sleep is of poor quality.

Students are smart. At the peak of their learning ability. Yet many are tired and as students in bygone eras did, turn to caffeine to stay awake.

Study of the impact of heavy digital use on the brain is the focus of the National Institutes of Health which now has a division to support studies of the parts of the brain involved with focus.

Broadcasters, mobile streamers, content producers and musicians will surely have an interest in their findings.

All of us from the content providers to the end users are experiencing increasing anxiety from digital overload. How simple and perhaps therapeutic it was to only have a radio to listen to on the way to school or work. Now, we text while driving, get the traffic and weather from our phones, check email and other things while making the same commute.

In the 60’s, a listener might curl up with a radio and listen to Jean Shepherd on WOR from 11:15 p.m. until midnight with no other distractions. Now, 45-minutes is a long time to commit to any kind of content.

We cannot begin to understand the most important thing of all unless we study the consumer - how is the end user able to receive that which we create?

Back to the Grand Canyon.

These five scientists experienced a form of withdrawal that ended on the third day. They called it "Third Day Syndrome". I recently experienced some of this myself on vacation at the beach. Those first few days were brutal. I sat there looking at the ocean doing everything I usually do at a desk with digital devices nearby. What a waste of a view.

Here are some observations from the Grand Canyon digital experiment:

1. At least one scientist arrived at the conclusion that he may be turning to his cell phone in moments of boredom. You and I may experience the same thing. I am wearing out my pockets pulling my iPhone out and pushing it back in. Am I bored? Students told me they liked to hold their cell phones in their hands. Made them feel better – more connected as they could glance down for messages and respond in kind.

2. Sometimes the cell phone was used so the user could be anti-social. That’s interesting as mobile devices allow us to be connected by Facebook and Twitter to other "friends" who are not in our company. Could we be shortchanging those around us?

3. It was observed that clear thoughts were the benefit of getting away to enjoy nature without the use of digital devices.

4. One scientist said he could now understand why teenagers decided to text while driving even putting themselves and others in danger.

5. Maybe digital stimulation leads to poor-decision making. Ever since I have owned my iPad and used it to read books at night, I have been getting lousy sleep. I Googled the phenomenon to find that others are having the same problem. Turns out the light emitted from the brilliant iPad screen even at the lowest settings disrupts sleep patterns. I went cold turkey for two weeks with better results. Now I ordered a Kindle for late night reading as much as I like the iPad better. Kindle digital “paper” does not produce the overstimulation of the iPad.

6. Most wanted to eliminate the digital overload to the point of seeing an improvement but not necessarily beyond. This may be the most interesting side effect of all. I, too, want as much digital stimulation in my life without getting brain weary, sleep deprived, rude to others or distracted.

In the end, consumers will have to learn to manage their digital lives better than they do now.

This adds an extra dilemma for content providers who are still new to the game.

But it also presents great opportunities.

The next Jean Shepherd could tuck you in with a 20-minute monologue developed for nighttime digital use whenever your "nighttime" is.

Radio will be used the way toothpaste is now used.

Squeeze your favorite morning personality out of your mobile device and use it on-demand in your “own” morning drive. Hopefully, you won't also spit it out like toothpaste.

For those of you who would prefer to get Jerry's daily posts by email for FREE, please click here. Then look for a verifying email from FeedBurner to start service.

There is a concept that good entrepreneurs know only too well, but nonprofits could stand to explore. A "value proposition" is the unique value a product or service provides a consumer. Without a value proposition a business has no place in the market. For a nonprofit, a social value proposition is just as critical to success, but often ignored. In an increasingly competitive marketplace, due in part to the growth of for-profit social entrepreneurs, nonprofits must analyze, articulate, and deliver on a social value proposition.

In the past, nonprofits could exist without a value proposition. Donors wouldn't argue that a library, homeless shelter, food pantry or school provided a necessary service. But as we move further down the road of social innovation, the assumption that money will automatically follow good works is no longer valid.

The issue is complicated by the fact that nonprofits have two sets of consumers: those who benefit from the product or service (clients) and those who buy the service (funders, investors, philanthropists). There is increasing competition for both sets of consumers.

In order to attract the consumers who buy services (and who, by the way, increasingly want a social return on their purchase) nonprofits must articulate the value that the consumer (donor, investor, philanthropist, sponsor, whatever you want to call them) receives by writing a check.

In the nonprofit sector the closest thing to a value proposition has been a case for support. But when this is created (which isn't often) it tends to focus on the organization and its needs rather than on the potential social return on investment for the funder. A good value proposition articulates how an organization is uniquely positioned to create significant social impact that is much greater than the costs associated. It involves an organization analyzing, understanding and delivering on three very important things:

1. Capability: What is the organization uniquely positioned to provide to the community (the marketplace). Why is this organization better positioned than other organizations (nonprofits, for-profits, government) to deliver it?
2. Social Impact: What change is the organization creating in the community, region, world? Why is this significant? Why should/will consumers (funders) care?
3. Cost: How do the costs of the service being delivered compare to that social impact? Is there a social profit being achieved, i.e. are the costs involved in delivering the service significantly less than the benefits? Will a funder (who is paying these costs) receive a significant social return on their investment in the organization?

A value proposition is less about a well-articulated statement and more about an organization's ability to think through these questions and really understand the marketplace in which they operate. More and more the nonprofit that can effectively execute on a social value proposition will find the financial stability that ultimately leads them to create lasting social change.

Photo Credit: Tim Snell

Dave Miller is a producer, writer, and director who, in addition to writing, producing, and directing feature length movies, owns his own production company.  He also writes and produces his critically acclaimed comedy web series Assisted Living, now in it’s 5th season on Koldcast.tv.

I’ve been meaning to sit down and chat with Dave ever since I created Beyond The Pedway.  When we finally got the chance, I popped into his office and chatted with him about his production company Mindlight Films.

As we got to talking, I realized many of his lessons from being a filmmaker could apply to creative entrepreneurs looking to start their own companies.  In the video interview above, we chat a bit about:

1. Needing a support structure
2. Adapting as technology and the marketplace changes
3. Surrounding yourself with the right people
4. Why you should iterate on your idea rather than waiting for the perfect idea
5. The importance of knowing your audience

If you can’t see the video interview above, please click here.  Below is a transcript from our interview.

Transcript

Dave Miller: I’m president of Mindlight Films, a production company here in Chicago that specializes in feature films.  And I also have a company Viral Film Video, which is more web based content, narrative, web series, commercials; pretty much across the board anything production related.

Tim Jahn: What was your background prior to Mindlight?

Dave Miller: Well, back prior to Mindlight was like high school and college and grade school.  So we started making little films with the super 8 running around in the forest with – making little action movies.  So it’s like I always knew I was going to be a filmmaker so I didn’t have to go out and decide in college what I was going to major in.  I always knew what I was going to do.  So it was a little bit more focused than a lot of friends of mine.

Tim Jahn: So you always knew, I mean you always had that idea in mind of what you wanted to be doing post school?

Dave Miller: Yeah.  Yeah.  I mean, I always knew it was film related or entertainment related.  I started off producing and then more recently got into writing and directing.  I was able to co-write two of the features that I produced which was a lot of fun and really started me off on developing more creatively in terms of the web series that I produced, which I actually write and direct as well.  So that’s been the most recent phase where I’m taking more creative role in productions.

Tim Jahn: So you’ve been doing Mindlight for I mean, what 20 years now?

Dave Miller: Just a little under 20.  Pretty close though.

Tim Jahn: So that’s a lot of time to be running your own thing.  What sort of challenges have you run into from inception until today?

Dave Miller: You know, it’s kind of a roller coaster.  I don’t run it by myself.  My wife and partner basically, we work together on a lot of things.  She has her own production company, Mimi Productions and I have Mindlight but we’re located in the same office and we share resources.  And when she’s busy, I work with her and when I’m busy, she works with me and it’s basically that kind of support structure that really allows you to kind of keep going.

I think in terms of what keeps you relevant is being able to adapt as technology changes, as the marketplace changes.  When we were doing feature films originally, there wasn’t as much competition for feature films.  So you could release a movie and you could get a decent advance when you were licensing it for DVD for example or putting it on paid TV or cable.

Now, those advances have gone way down even if you do get them.  So you basically have to either adapt you philosophy to making a film by lowering your budget to giving you that chance or raising your budget and bringing in name actors, which that’s kind of a disadvantage around here unless you’re really, really well connected.

Tim Jahn: And you mentioned that your wife is kind of like you’re partner in addition to her own company.  How important is that, you mentioned support structure, how important is that idea of who you surround yourself with kind of affects what you’ll create?  I mean, you mentioned – I mean, how important is that to you, the idea of having that group around you?

Dave Miller: It’s – from working on films where there’s a cast and crew over 40, 50 people to working a web series where there’s one or two, you definitely notice the differences between how that works.  And even when you’re working on a smaller production, you always have people that you could call in if you want somebody to read your script or say, “Hey, is this funny, does this work or does it not work?”  So I think it’s important.

But you also still have to know who to take advice from and not to just kind of open it up to everybody and rely on your experiences and learn from your mistakes and what works for you.  In the past when I used to write for, when I was writing the feature films, that’s a lot different than writing for web series.

I had to learn that kind of by trial and error, by going out and doing it and then realizing okay, well we cannot take seven minutes for a title sequence before somebody says anything on web series, that’s your whole show.  So you have to move things a lot faster.

Tim Jahn:  You mentioned you’re still learning.  What are you still learning?

Dave Miller: You know, I think that a challenge with directing especially is that there’s no two, there’s no – actors are all unique.  So it’s like engaging somebody that you want to give your performance, there’s no one way to do it.  Whereas in producing, there’s usually a way that you can rely on over and over again.

With directing, you have to tailor it to individual styles and personalities and it’s taken a while for me to do that and I’ve adapted, I’m continuing to try to adapt.  Whereas before it would just be, hey this is the way I want to do it and if somebody can’t do it, I’d try to find somebody who could.

Now, it’s – I’m a lot more easy going I think with that.  And that comes along with the terms that it’s a team effort really and they’re part of the team.  As long as you surround yourself with people who want to help make things the best thing that they can be, that’s all that I can ask for and then I’ll work with them as much as I can.

If something doesn’t go right, then I just won’t work with them again.  And if it does go right, then I’ll work with them over and over again.   A lot of the productions I do, I use a lot of the same actors because I enjoy working with them and its fun.

The most important thing I think in terms of writing is to just to do and then go through it.  Don’t sit, wait for perfect inspiration.  Write something and then you can always go back and work on fine tuning it, making it better which I think so many things have come from things that didn’t start off as being that amazing and then just evolved into something that’s good.

And also know your audience too.  My audience on the Internet is mostly male.  So it’s like I try to give them what I think that they want and what they tell me they want.  I’m not trying to write a movie that only I will like and no one will.  That’s a mistake that I see a lot.

It’s my pleasure to announce today that Windows is teaming up with the 7^th Annual Decibel International Festival of Electronic Music, Visual Art and New Media to serve as the Presenting Partner for this year’s dB Conference. The dB Conference, held in conjunction with the Decibel Festival program, is an educational series of panels, screenings and workshops that are free of charge to the general public. This series seeks to provide a space where artists, professionals and the public can exchange knowledge and create a supportive, creative community.

Scheduled for September 22-26 in Seattle, WA, Decibel is one of North America’s premier art and technology events.  This year’s festival is expected to attract more than 20,000 attendees and will include a diverse selection internationally-renowned artists, including Flying Lotus, Modeselektor, Carl Craig, Fennesz, Beats Antique, Pantha Du Prince, VibeSquaD, Monolake, Murcof, Scuba, Theo Parrish, Starkey, Mary Anne Hobbs, Plastician, Moritz Von Oswald Trio, Cassy, Ben Frost, Bluetech presents: Satori Social, as well as performances and talks by Windows DJs Dave Pezzner and Darek Mazzone

Here in Windows, we believe that creativity is a vital part of the human experience. Technology serves to free and empower the creative spirit in all of us, and we believe that Windows 7 is one of the most powerful vehicles for personal expression. For these reasons, we’re proud to be the Presenting Partner for this year’s dB Conference, which will be held at Pravda Studios in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood.

In addition to presenting the conference, Windows will sponsor four workshops with Festival partners on how anyone can use the versatility, powerful performance, simplicity and choice of the Windows platform to unleash their inner artist and create music. These workshops will be recorded so that artists unable to attend Decibel can share in the experience.

I’ll be your live Windows link at Decibel this September, and I’ll also have additional posts up shortly with more information on the topic of each session and who will be presenting. We’ll also have Festival passes to give away, and I’m working on some other treats for all you music lovers. Stay tuned!

But that’s not all: Over the next few weeks, the Windows Experience Blog will partner with the Microsoft News Center and the folks at Decibel to bring you additional features on Decibel and the dB Conference, as well as in-depth interviews with Dave Pezzner and Darek Mazzone. And don’t forget to follow me and Decibel Festival on Twitter for all the latest announcements.

Last week, Darek and I spoke about Windows’ Decibel sponsorship and what it can mean for up-and-coming artists:

Photo by Bootsy Holler, courtesy of Darek Mazzone. All Rights Reserved.

Ashley: For an artist just starting to make music, why go with a Windows PC?

Darek: It’s about performance and choice. Most people don’t have $2,500 to $3,000 to drop on a laptop, especially in developing countries or Eastern Europe. Does that mean you can’t create? Absolutely not! With Windows 7, you can start producing and DJing with the proper software right out of the box. Windows 7 is an insanely powerful and responsive operating system in the creative space.

Ashley: On KEXP’s Wo-Pop, you introduce us to new artists every week. What role do you think Windows can play in helping today’s up-and-coming artists?

Darek: The laptop running Windows has completely revolutionized music in all ways. In the past, if you were a musician, you would need to spend a fortune on recording equipment or a studio space. If you were from a developing country, often these things would be in Europe or the US which was impossible to get to unless you had a label. You might have been a great artist, but you weren’t heard or seen by anyone.

Now, I get tracks produced on laptops from every corner of the world—amazing hip hop from Mongolia, Electro Congolese noise from Kinshasa, Kuduro from Luanda. This was unheard of just a few years ago. But now, with Windows, these artists can be heard, tour and make a living to make more art. It’s a creative renaissance driven by music.

Ashley: Where can we find you at Decibel this year?

Darek: I’ll be playing the opening gala and speaking on a range of panels on promotion and social media. I’m looking forward to sharing my experiences with the attendees and keep watching this blog for updates on my schedule.

Ashley: How was DJing for Bill Clinton?

Darek: That was amazing. It was a very surreal experience with the Secret Service and the crowd completely mesmerized by the President. I’ll remember it forever. Bill is an inspiration with what he’s doing with the Clinton Foundation and the focus on Haiti and Central Africa. My focus is on music from all over the world, and to have Bill Clinton work on developing the technology infrastructure in those countries can only help get more music heard.

Related Links & Posts

· Windows Finds a Beat

· Windows in the Mix at Sonar

· Microsoft News Center

I don’t want to be in the shoes of Marvic Leonen right now.

Leonen, the chief government negotiator in the peace talks with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front and an acknowledged expert on the Philippine Constitution and minority rights, is now taking pains to explain to the public that amending the Constitution as a way to achieve a peace agreement in Mindanao is something that the administration of President Benigno S. Aquino III has not actually committed on doing.

While that is certainly an option, Leonen says Aquino never said that he is open to constitutional amendments and that changing the charter is just one of many options available that will have to be studied closely. Besides, it takes more than just a commitment by the president to change the Constitution, he says.

Leonen issued these clarifications in the wake of news reports that quoted him as saying to the effect that Aquino is amenable to the idea of amending the Constitution to accommodate the demands of the MILF, which has been waging a war for self-determination for decades now.

A particular headline in a Manila newspaper may have put Leonen in this tricky situation: “Gov’t open to Cha-cha to win peace in South.” The lead paragraph of the story goes on to state that  “President Benigno Aquino III is open to Charter change (Cha-cha) to reach an elusive peace settlement with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) during his six-year term, his chief peace negotiator said Monday.”

The problem with this story, of course, is that it is Leonen talking and that, as Leonen himself told reporters yesterday, Aquino never said anything like that.

“It is too speculative as of now to talk about whether the Constitution needs to be amended,” Leonen said in a text message to reporters on Tuesday. “Certainly we are studying closely the proposals of the MILF. They are saying that amendment is necessary. Good faith negotiations require that we consider the universe of possibilities. That does not necessarily translate to a certainty that amendment can or will happen.”

If Aquino indeed feels that amending the charter is a way to go, the implications would be huge and far-reaching. Is he now saying that his administration would be open to an agreement along the lines of the Memorandum of Agreement on Ancestral Domain that the Arroyo regime signed with the MILF? Partitioning the republic and give the MILF an actual territory, something that the present Constitution disallows?

Keep in mind that Aquino and his party denounced the MOA-AD or, perhaps more accurately, the way it was crafted. He called it a “travesty” and even excoriated the Supreme Court justices who struck the agreement down on technical grounds, not because the Arroyo administration supposedly abused its power.

Aquino said in October 2008: “If the dissenting justices believed that the MOA, its mootness notwithstanding, is unconstitutional because its contents and concepts are not sanctioned by the Constitution, and the President is without power to commit an assurance that the Constitution will be later amended to accommodate the MOA, then it should have been easy for them to believe that the President and her peace advisers, in conducting talks, in negotiating for the MOA in its present form and in initialing the same on behalf of the Government of the Republic of the Philippines, were acting beyond the constitutional constraints of their authority.”

Unless Aquino has changed his mind about the MOA-AD, it is clear that he would be put in a tight spot if he lets on even the slightest suggestion that he would amend the Constitution to accommodate the demands of the MILF. It’s not just about eating his words – it’s about the political backlash that such a change could elicit.

It gives the MILF’s cause a tremendous political boost, which would never sit well with the military and other anti-Bangsamoro politicians. Can you imagine the ruckus that would create? Already, Congressman Rodolfo Biazon, a former general and senator, is saying that offering to amend the charter is a sign of weakness on the government’s part. Filipino politics remains decidedly anti-Bangsamoro and the brouhaha that could entail has the potential to chip away at Aquino’s popularity.

In any case, Leonen now finds himself, as I said, in a tricky situation to the point that I now discern an effort on his part to temper his past positions on the peace negotiations with the MILF. Where before he argued strongly that the negotiations cannot succeed by limiting itself within the ambit of the Constitution and other state formulations, he now says that the process can work within the Constitution and that amending it is just an option that the state would study if the MILF brought it to the table.

“The MILF should also understand that our actions are measured against the framework of a Constitution -- a Constitution which, to my mind, provides space to find a political settlement including, if necessary and acceptable to all, a process of amendment and revision. I do not see the Constitution as a problem. I view it as a reality that we should deal with and should also be considered in finding the solution,” Leonen said in a speech this week.

While it is wrong to accuse Leonen of flip-flopping – I guess he’s just, um, fine-tuning --  the reality is that he has to answer to his principal, the president, who is bound to navigate these constitutional paths very carefully, lest he steps on the same landmines that doomed the MOA-AD and other past agreements.

Treading lightly from here on out would be key to Leonen and his team. It might not sit well, however, with some stakeholders in the Mindanao peace process might, considering that many Filipinos assumed that he was given the position to lead the government peace panel precisely because of his expertise on the Constitution and, more importantly, minority rights. The MILF and others who support self-determination for Filipino Muslims are justified in expecting Leonen to use his talent and skill not only to satisfy the wishes of his principal but, more importantly I think, to see the problem from the point of view of the minority, in this case the Bangsamoro as represented by the MILF.

But from where the MILF and the Bangsamoro sit, there is no other way a suitable agreement can be reached without amending the Constitution. This is why they were joyous over the MOA-AD when it was signed but were crushed when the agreement met resistance from Christian politicians and, ultimately, the Supreme Court. It was a breakthrough agreement as far as they were concerned; whether the Arroyo regime cut corners in crafting it didn’t really matter, especially from the MILF’s tactical point of view.

In the end, knowing how principled he is, I doubt Leonen will turn his back on what is right. He could try to fine-tune his personal position on this issue to make it consistent with Aquino’s but I’m willing to believe that he may just end up tempering his principal’s position in the hope that Aquino will have the political will to commit to whatever agreement is signed and be willing to risk his enormous political capital for something far more important than levying additional expressway toll fees on Metro Manila motorists. This is probably what Leonen’s appointment is all about in the first place.

*******

Below is a statement made by Leonen on Aug. 13 before the National Solidarity Conference for Mindanao in Quezon City.

 

Thank you for inviting me and providing the space to be able to address the topic that has been assigned to me and other issues in relation to the current peace talks.

It is always a relief to be among friends who share a passion for the same kind of peace. I expect that you will always be candid. That without any prodding, you will give feedback or share suggestions. I have no doubt that all this will be given with a lot of sincerity and urgency and always within a keen sense of history and context. That is why I have continued to respect your efforts.

Years ago, the challenge for both negotiating parties to consider, was stated simply by the MILF as: how to solve the Bangsamoro problem. This still is the most important question to address. We are however more fortunate than past negotiating panels in several respects.

There have already been significant steps taken, not only in the understanding of what inspires this question, but also in terms of clarifying the question further into more specific queries that the parties must address. Further, we have had significant political experience--on both sides--to draw up the kinds of solutions necessary to address this problem.

My direct principal, the incumbent President of the Republic of the Philippines--unlike his predecessor--now enjoys an overwhelmingly fresh mandate from the Filipino people. He was swept into power by citizens who not only wants him to redress the wrongdoings of the past, but also to learn from why these happened. In a speech delivered on April 22, 2010 at the Peace and Security Forum at the Mandarin Hotel, the President acknowledged that the lack of peace in Mindanao is the result of a “deeper systemic problem”. This was exacerbated by the former administration that “merely paid lip service to the quest for true peace, security and progress.” In his words:

“For close to a decade, the present administration has wasted opportunities to resolve our internal conflicts and move this nation forward. Instead it exploited the conditions spawned by the internecine conflict for political gain. It chose to coddle warlords willing to deliver command votes come election time rather than arrest them and implement the law.

“The rejection of the Memorandum of Agreement on Ancestral Domain (MOA-AD) has taught valuable but costly lessons to the advocates of peace.

“(a) The absence of a clear national policy and coherent strategy for peace negotiators led to confusion and false expectations across the table.

“(b) The negotiations were done secretly and without involving the views of key stakeholders whose futures depend on the ‘promise of Mindanao’

“(c) Moreover, negotiations were done in haste to meet deadlines set to gain ‘brownie points’ from an expectant international community.

“(d) The result was a patchwork of provisions in a document that caused greater division than unity.”

Thus, his policy statement that:

“We must revive the peace process on the basis of a comprehensive understanding of the root causes of the conflict, under clear policies that pave the way ahead, and driven by a genuine desire to attain a just and lasting peace.”

“We shall endeavor to restore confidence in the peace process that is transparent and participative, and renew our faith in our shared vision of a peaceful, secure and prosperous future under one sovereign flag.”

The most significant points made by the President should be underscored.

First, the peace process should happen “on the basis of a comprehensive understanding of the root causes of the conflict,”

Second, that it should be conducted under “clear policies that pave the way ahead, and driven by a genuine desire to attain a just and lasting peace.”

Third, that there should be a restoration of “confidence in the peace process that is transparent and participative”, and

Fourth, that we envision a “peaceful, secure and prosperous future under one sovereign flag.”

Fears have been recently expressed on three things: that we will be insisting that we (1) start from scratch; (2) localize the talks; and (3) replace the current facilitator of the talks. They say that these will “delay or even imperil the peace talks.”

We do not intend to start from scratch.

To even imply that we have even considered this possibility is to underestimate the political sense and historical understanding of the negotiators that have already been named and of this entire administration. Our marching orders are to move forward and to move forward with due deliberation and sincerity. This is a new administration with an overwhelmingly fresh mandate from the electorate. It is expected of us to review with due diligence all the agreements that have been signed. This does not mean that we will reject them--it only means that we are in the process of increasing our understanding of the implications and meanings of the provisions. In this regard, we are not limited in our review to the agreements that were signed. We have read government’s internal reports and are receiving briefings from the relevant personalities. Soon, we will proceed to review the official minutes of the negotiations of the past nine years.

More importantly, we seek to assess how we can more effectively and efficiently comply with the obligations that have been committed by the past administration.

I confirm the observation of Al Haj Murad Ebrahim, Chairman of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, that the ground situation is still acceptable. We are particularly pleased by reports that the International Monitoring Team and the other mechanisms are working satisfactorily. Even as we continue to review, we have honored our commitments that are necessary to provide for security, civilian protection and rehabilitation on the ground. This includes commitment of personnel as well as the proper budgetary allocations.

In the Aquino administration, a just, meaningful, comprehensive and durable peace is a major policy platform. Contrary to some naysayers from the past administration who continue to speculate based on their fears and inadequacies, the agenda is not simply counter-insurgency. Contrary to misreadings of alleged statements made from our military, there are no plans for a total war solution.

Soon enough, we will be ready to clarify our affirmation of the other agreements. If we are true to our word that we should only commit to what we can deliver, then we also need to do proper consultation and verification. To deliver means meeting the costs of that commitment--both financial and political.

The current peace talks address a domestic situation with international interest. Where the actual conversation takes place should be a function of where both parties are most comfortable. Where any negotiation takes place should facilitate discussion, it should not dominate the conversation. Like the MILF, we hope that this does not become an obstacle to reaching the more important goal of achieving a politically negotiated settlement.

We are specially appreciative of the various embassies that have visited us this past month. We acknowledge their willingness to continue to support the peace process We also acknowledge their recognition of the sovereignty of the Filipino people and territorial integrity of this Republic.

While expressing our utmost appreciation for all the international actors--state and non-state--that have come to share their time and other resources; we think it is legitimate for a new administration to review whether the current deployment is in harmony with its understanding of the national interest. There is a realpolitik in international relations. Also, good intentions notwithstanding, too many international actors can work at cross purposes to each other when located within a single ground. International interest and assistance is welcome, but it is we who will have to make sure that they facilitate rather than--unwittingly--deter an agreement.

We are eager to start talks on the one substantive agenda: the comprehensive compact. We are aware of the drafts exchanged by the parties on January 27, 2010. We will build on three realities: first, that the MILF has expressed that it has dropped its option for independence--that it is not negotiating for independence, but the highest form of autonomy; second, that the submissions of the parties (with Arroyo administration as the other party) are currently poles apart; and third, our mandate as framed by the President. We note that the MILF has rejected certain forms of “enhanced autonomy” and has proposed the idea of a establishment of a “state-sub-state form of governance in a future Bangsamoro state.”

The MILF should understand that we represent the government of the Republic of the Philippines. This includes many peoples and identities. This includes many stakeholders represented by various groupings. The MILF should also understand that our actions are measured against the framework of a Constitution--a constitution which, to my mind, provides space to find a political settlement including, if necessary and acceptable to all, a process of amendment and revision. I do not see the Constitution as a problem. I view it as a reality that we should deal with and should also be considered in finding the solution.

However, any good negotiator knows that attention to the process of the negotiation is as important as the substance of the conversation. We do not want the process to drive the substantive agenda. We want the process to facilitate it. And the process includes the levels of comfort that both negotiating parties have in relation to the parameters of the talks. It should include clear terms of reference that covers matters like the nature of the third party’s participation, protocols in communication, the setting of the agenda, sharing of the minutes of meetings, possibilities for direct conversations between the parties, role of international actors, among others.

Hence, I do not think that this new administration and this newly appointed negotiator can be faulted if we seek to review the terms of reference of the facilitation of the past discussions. I do not think that it is unwise for us to assess, based on the experience of the past panels and secretariats, whether we can be comfortable with the current facilitator. From our present understanding of what transpired towards the end of the past administration, this was even expected by the current facilitator. We would have thought that this would be welcomed by the other party and by the current facilitator (and the state to which she or he belongs), considering that it should show that we are sincere and professional in our tasks.

The challenge to the current administration is whether it has the creativity and political will to effect the necessary changes. The challenge to the MILF is whether it can be open, as creative and have the same political will to effect any agreed upon solution. The challenge to you is how you can engage constructively; and how you could help us meet the problems hurled by those who do not wish to engage constructively.

Our hand is extended in peace. It is extended consciously and deliberately. A hand extended in peace is a hundred times stronger and a million times more courageous than one than picks up a gun. Do not doubt the sincerity of this administration. Do not doubt my sincerity.

Take it, and let us make peace happen. Immediately.

...

Demand Media is the biggest pure-play SEO company in existence. And SEO is one of the fastest-growing marketing channels. So if you want to know what the marketing industry as a whole will look like, the best way to do it would be to take a look at Demand Media’s financial data. That information was available to investors and executives at the firm, but not to everyone else—until now.

On Friday, Demand Media filed a form S-1 with the SEC in preparation for going public. During the last week, I’ve read through it to see how much the world’s most successful SEO company makes from SEO.

There are a few big surprises; they’re less profitable than I expected, even though their accounting is more aggressive than I’d expected. But Demand Media has two major positive features. By combining their long-tail content business with their boring domain registration business, they may have created a domain registrar that can afford to offer lower prices than anyone else. And their content business could conceivably fix an economic inefficiency even larger than the one eBay solved.

eNom, Demand Media’s Registrar—The Boring Business

eNom was the first company Demand Media purchased, in early 2006. Demand’s financial data prior to that just comes from eNom, so it’s possible to get an idea of how valuable the registration business is as an independent entity.

Even better, there’s an older pure-play registrar, register.com, which was bought out in 2005, providing a starting point for a comparison multiple.

In Register’s last four quarters of operation, it generated revenue of $100mm, and operating cash flow of approximately $11.2mm. Their final purchase price was around $90mm excluding cash on hand. (Since then, it appears that Register.com hasn’t grown; they were recently purchased by Web.com, which touted a “combined company has a non-GAAP revenue run rate of approximately $180 million”—compare that to their trailing revenue of about $100mm, and it appears that Register is now doing about 20% less business than it was at the time of the acquisition).

eNom was actually less profitable than Register.com during the brief period that their financial statements overlap, but it makes up for it with strong growth. From 2005 to early 2007, annual revenue was basically flat. But from March to the end of the year in 2007, it grew at a 45% annual rate; the next year, eNom showed 61% growth. From 2008 to 2009, it grew by just 6%, but for the first half of 2010 they’re showing (unaudited) 40% growth.

If slow growth is worth .9X sales, what is 40% growth worth? It wouldn’t be surprising to see them valued at 2X to 3X sales.

But that revenue number may be conservative. Domain registrars book their revenues over the life of a registration, even though they generally get the cash upfront. So when eNom shows $X in new revenue this year, that $X will show up during each of the next few years. They don’t seem to disclose the average length of time for which their domains are registered, but one year is the minimum. This can provide an additional cushion to investors concerned about short-term accounting losses; as Godaddy’s CEO explains, “ during periods of sharp growth it is very difficult, in fact almost impossible, for us to show a profit.”

At 3X sales, Demand Media’s registrar business is worth $366mm as of this quarter.

Demand Media Studios: The Long-Tail Content Business

Demand Media was the first company to transform “long-tail” from a concept into a business. Starting with Chris Anderson’s Wired article, people have understood that the low transaction costs of online businesses mean that most of the growth comes from obscure stuff; Barnes & Noble would have to make some serious changes to fit 100% more books into their stores, while Amazon could make less significant changes to accommodate 1000% more titles.

But if Amazon’s business can take advantage of the Long Tail, the average SEO-focused business can thrive with it. One thing the original long-tail theory didn’t grasp was that specificity, on average, leads to higher engagement. And the best measure of “Engagement” is sales.

For example, consider someone trying to file their taxes late. They might start by searching for “taxes,” and find the information too generic. They’d narrow it down (and move into Long-Tail territory) with a more specific query like “File late taxes.” If that didn’t get them accurate enough results, they’d take it one step further—”file late 2008 taxes”. If they did that, they’d probably end up on the site of one of my clients. That client has ceded higher-traffic terms like “taxes” and “late taxes” to the IRS and competing tax sites. But as it turns out, specific terms are more likely to lead to a sale.

One of the strategies I used was to create content on “Article Directories,” (of which the most popular is EzineArticles.com—see my Ezine Articles SEO guide for details).

Article directories are Demand Media’s primitive ancestors. Their business model works a little like this:

1. Let people create content on whatever topics they want.

2. Edit the content to make sure it’s in acceptable English and not plagiarized (i.e. that it fits Google’s standards for minimum quality.)

3. Let writers include a link or two to their own content, so it’s worth writing.

4. Plaster the articles in ads.

5. Use every possible SEO trick to make the articles rank well on Google.

This business has great margins. As long as the cost of editing and hosting articles (probably under $4/article) is less than the revenue from ads, the business will thrive. And improvements in SEO will increase revenue for all of the articles.

Demand Media tweaked the formula. Their typical article is not “whatever topic you want”—it’s a specific subject that they’ve picked out based on search traffic data. In exchange for determining the article topic, Demand Media pays writers, often $15 per article.

It doesn’t take much for this to be an effective strategy. As long as:

1. Demand Media has good data on what’s being searched;

2. They have a large operation—for any topic they come up with, they can find a writer;

3. They can maximize the number of clicks on ads, versus on links; and

4. Demand Media has superior SEO: if an article directory is going to rank for a term, it will be their article directory;

Then they’ll have a competitive advantage over everyone else in the industry. And at that point, the only thing that limits their profits is the number of commercially-viable long-tail searches.

Do they have this advantage?

That’s a tougher question. But they’ve made some intelligent moves. As mentioned before, their domain registration business gives them a unique source of data and traffic. As long as they’re already in the business of monetizing pageviews based on traffic data, that’s going to provide them with extra profits.

And they’ve purchased some great domain names. Google has a policy of giving extra weight to established sites; if you’ve been online for a decade, you’re not going to throw away your reputation, so Google can afford to rank you better. eHow was registered in 1998. Cracked was registered in 1997. Trails.com was registered in 1999. You can only beat that by paying for it, and it’s tough to find cheap domain names that were registered that long ago. (It wasn’t so expensive a few years ago, when Demand Media was buying.)

They’ve also picked up some domains that will naturally earn links, like Livestrong.com, which was brilliant. They took goodwill for Lance Armstrong, as expressed by links, and turned it into a high-ranking health website.

But Demand Media’s real advantage may be their article quality. They’ve set prices at a point that makes it uneconomic to write a lengthy, well-researched article; better to write something quick that covers the topic without ultimately answering the question. And that is the perfect way to create an article that is less compelling than the ads. Right now, I can see the Demand Media is offering $16.00 to write “How to Build an Acorn Skiff”. I could write 500 words on the subject, but if someone read what I had to say, and saw ads for an “Acorn Skiff Kit,” or “Acorn Skiff Instructions,” they’d probably opt for the ad.

Demand has revealed their return on new articles, and the numbers are stunning. According to their own metrics:

We base our capital allocation decisions primarily on our analysis of a predicted internal rate of return and have generally observed favorable historical returns on content. For example, our article content published on eHow in the third quarter of 2008, or Q308 cohort, generated a 58% internal rate of return. This internal rate of return measure does not account for any revenue after June 30, 2010, although we anticipate that our Q308 cohort will continue to generate revenue for the foreseeable future and therefore achieve a higher internal rate of return. For example, article content produced in the Q308 cohort achieved 62% revenue growth in the second quarter of 2010 as compared to the second quarter of 2009.

Oddly enough, Demand is almost keeping two sets of books. While their IRR is calculated as:

the discount rate that, when applied to the advertising revenue, less certain direct ongoing costs, generated from the cohort over a period of time, produces an amount equal to the initial investment in that cohort.

But:

[W]e have paid substantially all of our freelance content creators upon the creation of text articles and videos, rather than on a revenue share basis, and we capitalize these payments.

In other words, the reported results for their content strategy bear only a tangential relationship to how profitable it is. Their return on new content is ridiculously high, but they report the upfront cost over several years.

And it’s growing. As of their S-1 filing, they generated “5,700 text articles and videos,” per day. Compare that to “the 4,000 videos and articles that Demand Media publishe[d] every day” as of last October. Later in their report, they reveal the “RPM” (revenue per thousand pageviews) for their content business over the last few years. In 2008, that number averaged $10.56; for the first six months of 2010, it was $11.81. Compared to the first half of 2009, total page views are up 23% (to 3.9 billion). Meanwhile, they have 2.2mm pieces of content (videos and articles). If that number is growing at 5,800 per day, it’s growing at approximately 24% per quarter.

This could be a sign that their ability to find profitable long-tail content to create is diminishing. (At some point, we’ll run out—or at least get to the point where the amount of content available expands based on new searches, not existing searches that are underexploited.)

Assuming the 24% quarterly growth number is correct, their annual growth in total content is around 136%, compared to their year over year pageview growth of 23%.

For their content business to generate continued growth, they need to do two things: they need continued RPM growth to counter the fact that they can’t buy as many pageviews as they once could. And they need to exploit higher-quality content.

With annualized revenue of $130mm+, annual growth of 41%, and an IRR of 58% (and declining, but perhaps gracefully), Demand Media’s current content business is probably worth at least 5X current sales, or $650mm.

Demand Media and eBay: Is an Attic Full of Collectibles like a Stay-at-Home Mom with a Masters Degree?

Demand Media is a puzzle, but you can put the pieces into place by examining what economic inefficiencies they exploit. Their name emphasizes the first one—they create content based on demand, which they can determine algorithmically. But an equally big story may be their supply.

Demand Media’s content business has solved a huge labor market inefficiency: there are millions of people who can write reasonably well, but who can’t efficiently get a full-time job. Think of students, housewives, retirees—and ignore anyone below the 90th percentile. It’s a gigantic population of people who are unlikely to get full-time jobs, but who can’t effectively spend their time doing piecework or freelance writing.

Thanks to Demand Media, they can do incremental writing work. If they can’t work full-time and it’s hard to judge them part-time, their labor is massively undervalued; in fact, if you look at the rise of blogging, tweeting, Wiki-ing, Q&A sites, etc., you could assume that the median price of their time is zero. By paying more than zero, at a huge scale, Demand Media may be able to buy and judge more hours of decent writing than any other company.

Treat those underused hours like assets, and you can see Demand Media as an opportunity like eBay. What propelled eBay’s growth was that a huge number of households owned knicknacks and antiques that they couldn’t cost-effectively sell. eBay created an efficient market in those products, and in just over a decade they cleaned out a couple million attics and garages, at a profit. Now that the big opportunity is gone, their growth has slowed down, but they’ve still established a wildly profitable business.

Demand Media has a similar opportunity—at a scale at least an order of magnitude larger. What’s the book value of all the antiques in the US? Something in the tens of billions sounds reasonable; something in the low hundreds of billions might be the upper limit. eBay earns commissions on those sales, with a maximum of fifteen percent.

Now, compare that to the value of the potential labor everyone in the 90th percentile of writing or movie-making skill, who doesn’t have or doesn’t want a full-time job, but would like some extra income. Figure $30/hr times two hours per week times population times (1 – labor force participation rate) times 10%, and you get a total value of $29 billion per year. That’s the amount of money left on the table if the top 10% of the 30% of people in the US who are not members of the labor force could have each written four articles for eHow.

But that’s just the price. If Demand Media earns even a small positive return on those otherwise unused hours of labor, the value could go up even more.

It gets better. Demand can afford to target the top 10%, but what about the top 1% or the top .1%? Once they have a system for ranking everyone’s quality, they can also start selling off premium talent at a premium price.

And that’s exactly what they’re doing. Many of Demand Media’s newer deals aim for a higher price point: premium content on SFGate.com and NFL.com, and $80 homepage HowTos for eHow.

As more of their writers are making (and earning!) $80 for a good article instead of $15 for a mediocre one, they’ll be able to attract better writers. At their current growth rate, there’s a good chance that they will be able to pay a more accurate market price than anyone for writing talent. We could see an online world in which people are divided into a) brand-name authors, most of whom make basically nothing, and a few of whom have great name recognition, and b) Demand Media authors, whose skill and value are efficiently quantified, and who make exactly what they’re worth.

That’s the big opportunity for Demand Media. Every day, talented people are wasting their time. And valuable content that could be written doesn’t get written. Matching these two parties is a many billion-dollar opportunity, and (at least in the short term), Demand can capture the majority of the value from arbitraging it.

That’s the upside. A $30 billion market, coming out of nowhere, where Demand Media has a de facto monopoly.

If there’s a 5% chance of creating this market, and Demand Media ends up with a 50% share of a $30bn market, with a 15% profit margin (low for a dominant content company; Google gets close to double that), they’d have a 1% chance at creating a business with $2.25bn in annual profits. At 15X earnings, that’s worth $33.75bn. Multiply by the 5% odds, and you get $1.69bn. Assume it takes ten years, and discount that to the present at 8%, and this opportunity is worth $782mm.

What is Demand Media Worth?

That’s a tough one. According to the Financial Times:

People familiar with the offering estimated it would value the company at about $1.5bn and would be priced by November.

Based on some tricky estimates, vague comparisons, and wild guesses:

• The registrar is worth $366mm.

• The current content business is wroth $650mm.

• The small chance of a hugely successful content business is worth $782mm.

• And they have cash on hand of $33mm.

At those prices, the total value of the company is $1.83bn.

Ten Questions for Demand Media’s Management

If you’re thinking of investing in Demand Media, or you get a chance to participate in their IPO roadshow, here are some unanswered questions that could firm up their valuation.

1. Why equity? If investing in new long-tail content produces such a high IRR, with such low marginal cash requirements, why not issue bonds instead?

2. Why is capitalized content amortized over five years, and not based on lifetime expected traffic?

3. How fast is the total amount of long-tail traffic growing? When will Demand Media saturate the immediate market?

4. What were the circumstances behind buying The Daily Plate from Demand Media employees—and are other employees working on similar projects?

5. Does the RPM for content vary based on how it’s found? Is there more growth in low-RPM or high-RPM traffic sources?

6. What is the IRR for Demand Media’s different content types—long articles, short answers, and video content?

7. Does Google view eHow, in its current form, as a problem?

8. What aspects of Demand Media’s niche-targeting strategy are not replicable?

9. What IRR do competitors get on content they create?

10. Does Demand Media expect to compete by paying more for content, earning less on ads, or both?

Demand Media is the most exciting IPO since Google. It’s a transformative business—for anyone who works online, sells online, or could do valuable work with a more efficient labor market. For many people, it’s disruptive; I expect Demand Media to reduce the demand for the work I do, and to outbid me for the people I’d like to hire. But overall, the effect is positive. Ultimately, Demand Media is living up to their name—they’re matching supply and demand, and they could make a fortune from it.

Join the conversation about this story »

See Also:

• Why Demand Media (And Similar Models) Will Succeed
• Demand Media Files For IPO
• Demand Media Writer: "I Hope To God People Don't Read My Advice"

We are looking for a long term grandmotherly type nanny. We are a family that is very busy, we are looking for someone that takes initiative in getting things done. My main goal is that my baby learn and grow from this person. I want this person to be with our family long term, and I want to make sure that this person knows that they want to care for our child and keep our home. Our ideal person would have 10 plus years of experience in watching infants and toddlers.This person would be able to clean, deeply, as well as pick up and organize. This person would be able to make simple meals and be able to grocery shop and run a few errands here and there. We are a fair and honest couple that want to enrich our baby. We are offering a flexible schedule, however this person will need to work at least 4 days a week. We are offering $9.00-$12.00 an hour or, we are happy to set a monthly salary. We are offering a fun environment with room to grow.Our requirements are as follows:

Must be bilingual
Must have Valid Drivers Lic.
Must have own car in good working condition
Must have good driving history. (Must furnish copy of driving record )
Must have insurance
Must submit to drug/background check
Must be able to clean very well
Must be able to cook, and multi task
Must have CPR or be willing to get certified
Must commit to at least one year.
Must commit to working 25-35 hours a week.
Must be able to manage themselves as well as our household. (Multitasking is key, and our baby is priority)

If you believe you are the one for us, please send us the following:

1) Name
2) Telephone number
3) Hourly Salary requirement
4) Days and times of availability
5) Years of relevant experience, and how you would make our lives easier and how you would make our baby happy
6) Give us a sample routine on how you would spend your day with our child. What would the baby do all day? What routine would you create?
7) Copy of your resume


We will be interviewing Aug 17th and 18th. The position will be begin the following week.

Please note: Do not apply if you do not fit the requirements. I know how tough things are out there, and I am sorry if you do not have the qualifications. We are very set on the above criteria, and we know we will find the best possible person with all of the love and energy to watch our child.

For any creative professional who is providing a service, the difference between making money now and making money over the long-term can be pretty frightening. On the one hand, we all have the tendency to make decisions based on the power of a dollar. How many jobs have we taken that we were over-qualified for? How many assignments did we take because we needed to pay a bill?

Are You Providing a Service?

The idea that you, as a creative professional, are providing a service goes much deeper than making those quick decisions. Let me walk you through an example of what I’m talking about.

Let’s say I get hired to write a story set within the Hellboy universe. (Hah, I wish!) Because that setting is owned by Mike Mignola, I would not own the rights to what I’ve written. Since I already know the setting, I don’t need to spend a lot of time learning about Hellboy, so I wouldn’t lose a lot of time there. I would, however, need to research new stories within the setting because there’s already been a lot of myths covered. Then, there’s the time it would take to write the story and go through the editing process. Once the story was done, I can’t do anything else with it because now it belongs to someone else. Even though I wrote for a setting I love, I still produced an asset for someone other than myself. In short, I provided a service to develop something that someone already had a need for.

This example highlights how writing for a tie-in property typically works. The reality of being a creative professional is that we produce content for other people in order to make a living. I look at the process of developing an asset for someone else as our ability to provide a service rather than produce a deliverable. Other examples range from writing website copy for someone else’s business to graphic design to developing a game and pitching it to a publisher. The concept, though, is pretty simple to follow once you start tracking how the money is flowing to you. If you get paid up front for the work you’re doing, I feel that it’s helpful to look at your time as a service related to product development. You are, in effect, developing and providing an asset that someone else needs and will, in turn, sell.

Or Are You Creating an Asset?

When you design something for other people to purchase that you have more control over, then you’re creating an asset. An example of that is an illustrator creating a clip-art CD or offering prints for sale of artwork they own the rights to.

Now, there are advantages to both business models because, in many ways, an asset’s value increases depending upon how many people want that asset. I could design an interactive fairy tale for you, but if you didn’t want it, then it’s not worth anything and I’d lose money because I had just spent all that time creating something you don’t care about. The reality of developing your own assets, is that it isn’t enough “just” to create the asset. You need to figure out how you can get people to pay for it. For a writer, that means you have to develop a strong base of readers that will invest in your work.

A really good example of what I’m talking about here, are some of the arguments that self-published authors make. To those that don’t understand how publishing works, the publisher is greedy because they have too much control over the author’s asset (e.g. the book). What they don’t understand, is that the publisher is providing the author with a better chance of reaching readers which makes their asset more valuable. Even though there are many services out there that offer some of the same services as a publisher does, the majority of self-published authors don’t sell thousands of copies of their work for a variety of reasons. For starters, those services are not discriminate; they do not turn down an author based on the quality of the work. Publishers do, because they understand that books are assets that represent the author, but also their brand name, too. This is why authors who go through traditional models typically sell more books simply because of the way publishing works.

Then What?

Now, the examples I mentioned above may not apply to you specifically, but the idea is still the same. If you think about your time as your primary asset, then consider the following questions: Do I own what I create? If so, how am I getting paid for it? If I’m not getting paid what I’m worth, then how can I get paid more?

For myself, I don’t attach a “good” or “bad” value to providing a service versus offering an asset because I look at them in terms of different business models. Which is, realistically, what they are. I’d absolutely write a tie-in story for a property I’d love; on the flip side, I’d still want to write a fun story of my own, too.

Not sure about what you think about my post today, but I feel this idea is pretty important. That’s part of the reason why there’s so many changes going on here behind-the-scenes that I haven’t announced yet.

Deep thoughts today! Do these questions resonate with you? Why or why not?

Related posts:

1. The Cost of Writing Fiction versus Nonfiction
2. Market Your Books by Offering Free Samples
3. The Importance of Being Persistent

L.J. This one's for you man.

Horrible? Not a top 100 quarterback in NFL history? Only in because of a guarantee?

That's the words I've heard when it comes to a lot of Bleacher Report writers who think that Joe Namath is actually a disgrace to the Hall of Fame and should be removed.

I've been writing about the game nearly three years now.

I remember when I first looked at Joe Namath's stats. I didn't think he deserved to be kicked out of the Hall of Fame.

I thought maybe he's a bit overrated.

Maybe he shouldn't be as heralded as he was.

But, I never believed he didn't deserve the recognition for the miracle he performed.

He did in ONE game what a league had been trying to do for nine years.

He beat an NFL team soundly.

He was the smartest guy on that field. He created the offensive gameplan. He saw where they were weak on the ground, and where they were weak in the passing game.

He was the face that the AFL needed to survive.

His swagger, his ability, his charm, and his love for the game was so pure. Joe Namath had that confidence about him that just rubbed off on people.

Just watching him play was amazing. Every architect of the passing game that we know of wanted him as their quarterback.

From Sid Gillman to Al Davis to Bill Walsh, Namath's ability was realized.

Isn't it strange how none of those who doubt, and I mean really doubt, Namath's Hall of Fame status ever watched him play?

I have yet to see a senior citizen on this website say anything negative about Joe Namath.

Isn't it odd how the opposition to Joe Namath's legacy isn't even old enough to run for president?

Isn't it peculiar that these men, you know who you are, are at most 30? 12 years after Joe Willie won the Super Bowl is when they were born at best.

Who are they to judge Namath?

Who are they to question the legendary sportswriters that didn't use computers to judge a player but their eyes?

The men such as Paul Zimmerman and Ray Didinger who used a typewriter, and had notepads and pencils to record notes. The iPad wasn't even a thought. Only girls with horrible reputations would dare to wear the outfits that appear in malls and on 12-year-olds today.

Ah, the arrogance and the disrespect of youth.

One of the biggest problems in the world is that the young are always convinced that their elders are complete morons and they, the new age, see things clearly.

Thus, you get a young man that thinks just because he read some numbers in columns on a website or two, that he can tell a person's career in its entirety.

He thinks that 173 touchdowns to 220 interceptions tells the facts and that's that.

I guess that just because a man has tattoos means he's been in the army or a gang?

Its stereotyping. It is pure stereotyping of football players. They see a number like Brett Favre's 317 interceptions and think 'Oh, he's awful. Terrible, terrible passer."

Yeah, well he had 497 touchdowns! How about that?

To all of you who think that you can judge Joe Namath and deem him unworthy of the praise that real professional writers and great coaches have give him; I'm surprised that you can stand up with those huge heads you have.

You are obviously not detailed thinkers for one. You don't try hard enough in your arguments, and you are incapable of sufficient research.

Well, Bleacher Report's defense attorney, James Williamson, has been retained to put the kibosh on this erroneous findings.

For the record, lets look at Joe Namath's life before he entered the world of professional football.

Alabama coach, Paul "Bear" Bryant, said that Joe Namath was the greatest athlete he'd ever coached.

Coming from a guy who's won over 300 games in college football, had coached the likes of Hall of Famers like Bart Starr, John Hannah, Dwight Stephenson, Ozzie Newsome, and Don Hutson.

Yeah, he sure doesn't know what he's talking about because he hasn't seen the stats right? Stats are the gifts from God right? They tell every detail of the game right?

Many people called "Broadway" Joe Namath an amazingly accurate passer. Well, they are all wrong obviously. Joe Namath had a career completion percentage of 50.1, that's barely one out of every two passes made it to the receivers hands.

Is it inconceivable, that a defender managed to get a hand on a ball that was on target, and knocked it away?

Is it inconceivable to think that none of those incompletions were thrown away balls?

Or how about the idea that a receiver, who is a human being, slipped and didn't get to the ball or dropped a pass?

That can't be though. The stats would've noted that right?

Right, because we can believe everything Microsoft Excel can create?

You can't argue with his Joe Namath's quarterback record though. He won 62 games, lost 64, and tied in four games.

Never mind the concept that teams win games right?

Or how about the fact that Joe Namath had no knees yet still played in tremendous pain, and he even played with a broken jaw once?

Things like bad knees that prevent you from running, from throwing the football correctly because your legs aren't set, from avoiding a sack are not relevent to the game of football because they don't have mentions of those on websites.

If there isn't a statistic, there isn't a case.

Never mind the fact that when he was healthy for a full season, which was six years, he was 36-29-4 as a starter, which is a winning record for a bad team at times. Never mind that his own peers, not the girls who thought he was super cute, wrote on ballots and selected him to Pro Bowls.

Fellow players and REAL sportswriters felt that this guy was worthy enough to go to five Pro Bowls and be on the first team All-Pro in 1968. In six good years, he was an elite player five times.

But, they are all old geezers who don't know football like the young generation who doesn't even watch all the games, but looks up numbers on NFL.com to support their opinions.

Forget the fact that before 1978, only one man had ever thrown for 4,000 yards in a season and his name was Joe Willie Namath.

Forget that before 1978, you could bump receivers, put your hands in their faces, block their hands with your body if you were a defensive back, and it would not be called pass interference.

Yet, Joe Willie Namath threw for 4,007 yards in 14 games with seven of those games in New York where it is windy and hard to throw.

There are those who think Namath doesn't belong because he didn't play 10 or 12 full years. Well, let me remind you of the basic requirement for the Hall of Fame. I'm going to hold off on the satire and be really blunt right here.

If you play five seasons in the National Football League, you are eligible to be a Hall of Famer. That's it. Only five seasons.

So, the argument is moot. You can't keep a man out of the Hall of Fame because he only played a few years.

Gale Sayers is in the Hall of Fame yet he only had five full years due to knee injuries.

Dick Butkus only played nine years and four with basically no knees. You want to take him out?

The Hall of Fame isn't about longevity. Longevity can be used to help a case, but not as something to hold a person out.

The Hall of Fame is about dominance.

It is about how much you contributed to the game.

The impact you had on the league.

Most importantly, can you write the history of professional football and exclude his name?

Can you give me a basic history of football without Joe Namath and his guarantee?

I'd like to see it. Come on, you know who you are, I'm not going to call you out, but I'm daring you to try.

When I think of Joe Namath, I think about what he could've accomplished had he been healthy.

He was quirky, and was a player with the ladies and the beer halls. I remember what John Madden said, "If he couldn't have played football the way he did then all that other stuff; you would've laughed at."

Well, he could play football.

That is why he is respected by his peers because they knew that with all the gallantry and all the charisma, this man was a great football.

Bill Walsh never gave a compliment that he didn't believe in. He felt that a false compliment was just as bad as an insult, so when Bill Walsh said something good about someone, he meant it.

"Well, Joe Namath was the most exciting quarterback to play the game and to watch play. He had a style that no one else had had. His feet were so quick and so smooth. It was almost like watching a ballet in motion."

I remember Walsh picked Joe Montana because he saw those same characteristics in him. He used Joe Namath to pick out the man who won four Super Bowls.

And to think that this new generation of stat addicts think that Walsh has to be wrong about Namath.

The Hall of Fame selectors didn't think these men were wrong when they inducted Namath in.

They knew the Hall of Fame is not for just statistics. It's for contributions. Statistics are part of the picture yes, but if you set a new standard in the NFL or you invent a new move or you win a game that changed Pro Football forever, you belong there.

There are people that say Joe Namath didn't play that great in Super Bowl III. He was only 17/28 for 206 yards. The running back, Matt Snell, really should've been the MVP.

He scored the rushing touchdown to put the Jets up 7-0, and he had 121 yards rushing on 30 carries.

You know, there's a saying, a double-team is as good as a sack. It applies to defensive linemen. If one guy takes two offensive linemen to bring block him, he basically has gotten a sack because someone is free to get the quarterback.

Well, after the guarantee, who do you think was being double teamed? Who do you think was the number one target?

It wasn't the running back, it was the flashy quarterback who said that his team was going to win the game. Those Colts defenders wanted Namath. Namath knew that they wouldn't be focused on Snell enough.

Namath goes in the huddle and looks to his men and calls running plays. Not because he didn't believe they could win by passing, but because he wanted to dominate the time of possession. He wanted his team to focus the offensive attack and how do you do that?

You run the ball. Convert key third downs. Don't turn the ball over. Don't be risky. Keep their defense tired, your defense rested, and you will win the game the majority of the time.

He could've thrown for 300 yards, four touchdowns, but he wanted to keep his defense confident that they could do their jobs and help him out.

And 206 passing yards is actually pretty good when you think about it.

Joe Namath never had a great supporting cast. Only one other player he worked with during his prime went to the Hall of Fame and that was Don Maynard.

He was told by doctors that he maybe had five years. Five was all it took for Joe Willie to prove the AFL was a legitimate organization.

I think Namath should be honored for doing something in five years what some quarterbacks could not do in 15.

There is not a more important quarterback in the history of the NFL. You can talk about Joe Montana, Johnny Unitas, Tom Brady, Peyton Manning... They all take a back seat to Joe Willie Namath in importance to what the NFL is today.

And here are some people with questionable IQ levels that want him out?

Excuse me while I go to the bathroom and laugh at your expenses. You know who you are gentlemen.

 

Most people wrongly assume they're only a host when they throw a wedding, work in a restaurant, or sponsor an event. Untrue. The simple fact is that anytime someone visits your office, your department, your company, and even your car, they're your customer or client and by default, your automatic guest.  Who are you?  My host.  You want my business, but so does the company next door, down the street, or the neighborhood over. I'm not an intrusion. I'm your life preserver in an economic ocean where companies are bitten and devoured by sharks. Welcome me when I arrive at your office. Here's how. Pineapples optional, although forwarding to the office staff is smart business.

1. Make my trip to and my arrival at your office as smooth as possible. Have as standard practice directions sent to first-time visitors. Ask my preference. Would I prefer directions sent electronically or in hardcopy form through the mail?

Your job is to always make it easier on me. I've visited companies where I feel lost in one-way driving and parking hell. If your parking garage or building path is particularly tricky, use a highlighter pen to clearly mark the route I should follow. Clarify which level on the eight-level garage I should park. Of the four elevators located at the four corners of your building, which one should I take?

Once parked and elevated at the proper level, give me visual markers. Tell me if I'm going to walk down a long hallway, pass a Starbucks kiosk, and see a water fountain to my right. These nonverbal indicators reassure me I'm on the right path, alleviating possible confusion and enhancing my comfort level.

2. Consider welcome signage. I once worked at an educational institute where different people visited each day: prospective students, possible job hires, visiting personnel, and even parents footing the financial bill. In the main lobby, there was a tasteful, noticeable display stand listing the date and that day's visitors. The sign would read "July 6, 2010" with the line "ITT Technical Institute welcomes the following guests:" The sign would even have courtesy titles (Mr. Pat Heim or Ms. Taylor Jennings), eliminating bafflement over a unisex first name. Control the Controllables.

3. Your point of first contact is paramount. Unofficially dubbed the "Director of First Impressions", this person creates the initial impression of any guest's visit. Hotels have architecture, homes have curb appeal, and your office has an individual whose words and actions set the tone for the rest of the visit. As you read this, reflect who holds this position in your company. What impression do they communicate? What training have you offered to help them improve? Have you emphasized the significance of their role in your company? If not, explore, explain, and equip.

4. Your point of first contact must be versed in guest-welcoming protocol. As a guest, I should clearly state my name and the person I'm meeting at what time. An example might be, "Hello, my name is LisaMarie Luccioni and I have a 2:00 appointment with Mr. Mike Sharp of Human Resources."

An affirming welcome should be offered. Something like, "Mr. Sharp is looking forward to meeting you, Ms. Luccioni," works nicely. In all my years of conducting business, I've only been confirmed in a similar way a paltry five times. Those that did were not forgotten. Too few companies welcome appropriately, generously, and consistently. Be one that does.

5. Attend to your guest's coat and burdensome packages, bags, etc. Offer to take the visitor's coat or umbrella, for example, and if given, treat these belongings with respect. Don't nonchalantly throw someone's jacket into a wrinkly heap on any available surface. Instead, take pains to carefully drape across a hanger. Because everything communicates, invest in quality hangers and leave the flimsy wire varieties for dry cleaning pick-up. You're not the business who treats my account with second-rate materials, are you?

6. Ask if your guest would like a beverage. If this is a second visit, remember my original preferences. Record them if necessary. If I enjoyed decaf coffee with cream and sugar last time I visited (a good bet I did so), inquire if I still take the same. Wow. Not only did you welcome me, tell me I was expected, and offer to take my coat, you invited me to enjoy my preferred drink of choice. This, I declare to all who read, is how customer service should work.

7. If the host is running late (which better not be a habit), relay how long the host will be. As a guest, I should arrive approximately 15 minutes early. I won't wait longer than 30 minutes after our slated appointment and have actually walked out of lobbies where companies kept me waiting past that time. It's unfortunate because they're probably the company who needs my services the most.

My time is valuable. Don't waste it. Your competitor down the road is honoring their time commitment. If you want to (1) get me and (2) keep me as a client, smoothly get me in and graciously get me out.

8. How does your guest waiting room look? What messages are sent? After reading this blog post, take a stroll to your company's waiting area. Would you enjoy the stay? Some rooms have so depressed me, I could feel my psychological spirit take a nosedive.

Do you have enough seating spaces? Are they comfortable? Is the furniture of good quality and dusted or conversely, chipped and stained?

Color psychology impacts visitors' impressions. Research shows that rooms painted in cooler tones (blues, greens, etc.) promote formal, more reserved conversation. Rooms painted in warm hues trigger more casual, informal conversation. Which type of environment do you seek to create? Neither is necessarily better, simply different.

9. Instruct all office personnel walking through waiting rooms to acknowledge the visitor's presence. A simple eye connection, head nod, and smile are sufficient, but add a "Good Morning" or "Good Afternoon" and watch a guest's impression of your work team skyrocket like the fireworks just released this Fourth of July.

These people (we could call them points of second contact) also play a strategic role in guest perception formation. Their behavior reveals whether the company's point of first contact was an enjoyable fluke or confirms that this affirming behavior is the corporate culture norm.

10. I always enjoy when my host personally stops by the waiting room. I recognize that often assistants fulfill this role, but how lovely when the person I come to visit personally greets me. I feel important enough to warrant the gesture.  I will not forget.  

If an assistant must escort me through the hallways corridors, make appropriate introductions as we encounter people I should know. Uncertain how to make correct introductions? There is a correct way and guidelines can be found here: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-image-professor/201003/forgot-my-name-your-competition-didnt

Once we reach the host's office, they should either (1) be waiting by the door upon arrival or (2) immediately come out from behind their desk (barrier) and greet me with a hearty handshake, steady eye contact, and an invitation to sit down. A simple "Please have a seat, LisaMarie" with a gesture toward the determined chair is appreciated.

11. If this is not a first meeting, use our earlier discussion to make personal connection and application to me. Perhaps I mentioned I was planning a visit to Martha's Vineyard. Introduce the subject and ask how the trip went. If we earlier bonded over a love of Graeter's Peanut Butter Chip ice cream, tell me you took the kids there the other day and your daughter Caitlyn ordered the same flavor and loved it. You remembered my preferences and reinforced them during this follow-up interaction. People do business with people they like and possess commonalities. Emphasize this mutual interest.

12. Have a care regarding office table arrangements. Most offices are situated in this pattern: a desk with a chair on either side. This nonverbal arrangement can create a "me" against "them" tone. If you seek to equalize power and rank (and space allows), consider adding a circular table to your office. Everyone is equal in a circular seating arrangement.

13. When our meeting's finished, end wisely and well.  Hand me my coat, shake hands correctly (http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-image-professor/200912/got-handshake-the-silent-communicator), reinforce you'll follow through on meeting outcomes by a certain date and method (email, phone call, etc.) and walk me to an exit where I can easily find my car.

14. Send a thank-you note. At a minimum, an email thanking me for my time is a nice touch. But first-time and other important meetings may demand the Godiva's of gratitude: a handwritten thank you note (spell my name correctly, please) sent no later than the next day.

Bottom Line?  You're the company with the following welcome mat at your door front.  Make it happen.  Customers and clients will enter and remain.

 

© 2010 The Image Establishment, All Rights Reserved

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Email LisaMarie:  professorlml@aol.com (subject line of "Psychology Today")

In her thoughtful and lively book, How Fantasy Becomes Reality, social psychologist (and PT blogger), Karen Dill, deftly moves beyond the question of whether or not our use of screen media affects us. That debate, she confirms, is essentially over: it does.

The more interesting question she asks is why we are so quick to deny such influence. As Dill argues, such denial renders us even more vulnerable to “media effects.” Her task is to help us understand how our media use affects us (without our realizing it), so that we can begin to participate more proactively in the evolution of its form and content, and live healthier lives.

To this end, Dill shakes our glazed gaze free, reminding us that, “The primary reason people produce media is to make money” (47), and not to entertain, educate, or inform, as we might like to believe. Using tools of social psychology, Dill examines how they do: media producers provide eye-catching images and emotion-wringing scripts that stir our primal desires for food, sex, and social belonging. They attract our attention by shocking our sensory selves. We are soon addicted to the charge.

Why are we so vulnerable? 

As Dill explains, the form and content of today’s screen media—and she examines television shows, movies, rap music, music videos, video games, advertising, and political coverage—play right into our strengths as the socially-wired creatures we humans are. 

Face to face with desire-grabbing images and sense-assaulting scripts, we cannot help comparing ourselves to what we see. We cannot help imitating at a neuro-chemical level the actions that we see. Nor can we help repeating stereotypes about race and gender, or absorbing the persistent, implicit message of many video games, rap songs, and popular films that violence is an acceptable and useful response to life’s conflicts. 

In short it is our nature as social creatures to learn from what we see about what is real, what matters, how we should act, and where we should, or do not, fit in. We do so without thinking. Even though we know that what we are seeing is fiction, it registers in our brains as real. 

Thus, where our social brains meet screen media, Dill reports, we are apt to grow both increasingly anxious and insecure about our selves (as compared to the media’s ideal forms), and addicted to the virtual and vicarious bursts of pleasure that those same images provide. In such a state we are more vulnerable than ever to promises about what products will fill the gaps that our use of media has opened. Advertisers take note. 

To protect ourselves, Dill advises us to assume that we are being manipulated, and then think critically, consume wisely, unplug frequently, vary our intake, and seek out non-screen activities that engage us in a state of flow. 
*
As a philosopher and scholar of religion, I warm to many aspects of this book—its wealth of information, its colorful descriptions of psychological experiments, and its illuminating anecdotes. I also appreciate how well Dill’s analysis illustrates the dynamic I describe in What a Body Knows. When it comes to media use, the movements we are making are making us. 

As I discuss in What a Body Knows, our consumption of media images provides an important part of the sensory education we receive in learning to perceive and respond to our desires for food, sex, and spirit (that is, a sense of vitality, direction and belonging). Training our attention to the information coming to us through our screens encourages us to believe that the answers to our most basic questions—what to eat, how to love, who to be—lie outside of ourselves. We come to believe that we will find the nourishment, the intimacy, and the sense of belonging we seek by using our mental powers to form our bodily selves in accord with some (media-mediated) ideal of the perfect body, the most passionate love, or the best belief. If I were only thin, rich, successful, married, or member of the right community, then I would be happy. Yet, as I document at length, as we pursue these externally-oriented, mind-over-body paths to pleasure, we are not getting what we want. 

What Dill reminds me is that this capacity to tune in and attune to our environments is not the problem. It is highly adaptive. It is perhaps our greatest strength as the humans we are. It is the source of our ability to empathize with others, to create stable relationships, to act on the basis of compassion and love. 

Rather, the problem is that our current quotient of screen time is exercising this social skill at the expanse of its enabling complement: the capacity to attune to our own sensory selves, and find in the movements of our pain and pleasure the guidance we need to know what will support our thriving. 

In order to navigate our social worlds effectively, it is not enough to be able to coordinate our movements with what lies around us, we must also be able to register the impact of the movements we make on us. We need to cultivate the sensory awareness of how the movements we make are making us. 

Doing so allows us to stay in touch with our freedom. Doing so provides us with a ground in ourselves for discernment. Doing so allows us to perceive the images mediated to us from external sources as catalysts to our creativity, learning, and greater freedom, rather than as proof of our own inadequacy. 

My conclusion here aligns with Dill’s: we do need to unplug, and when we do, we need to engage in activities that exercise our attention differently than screen time does. We need to drop in to our bodily selves, and allow our mental machinations to find their roots in the health and well being of our bodily selves. (See how: Come to Your Senses)

As the bodily selves we are, we can’t stop perceiving, feeling, and understanding; we can’t help creating patterns of sensation and response as we do. We can’t stop the rhythms of our bodily becoming, even as we stare into a screen. We can only ask ourselves: what is it that we want to create?

by Tom Philpott.

Like recycling, listening to NPR, and caring about the World Cup, everyday cooking has become a de rigeur activity for those with certain class and cultural aspirations.

And that’s as it should be. We need more home cooks. If diversified, human-scale, community-directed farms are going to thrive, then a much broader swath of the population has to know how to turn raw ingredients into dinner—and do it regularly.

But home cooking has been in decline for at least a couple of generations. For most young to middle-aged adults, childhood food memories center on takeout, heat-and-serve microwave fare, and perhaps the occasional fancy meals for birthdays and holidays.

If you’re an adult who didn’t learn the basics of everyday cooking at the parental knee, how to do it at this late date? One way—the path I took—is through cookbooks. Until pretty recently, the most interesting cookbooks that emerged from publishing houses involved what might be called “weekend” or “special occasion” meals: they had you scrambling for rarified ingredients and, quite often, spending hours constructing a single dish.

As a way to learn to cook, it was lots of fun, but also ad hoc and time-devouring. What about people who want to gain kitchen chops, but aren’t willing to spend most of their free time frying each ingredient individually for a classic Mexican mole, fixing a broken béarnaise, or tackling the vast pile of dirty pots and pans that such projects create? What about people who just want to put a nice dinner on the table after working all day Tuesday, with ingredients they picked up at the farmers market Saturday?

Unshackled from the magazine grind, Middleton has delivered a terrific cookbook, particularly for those in the steep part of cooking’s endless learning curve.

At least since World War II, there has never been a shortage of cookbooks promising “quick & easy” recipes, many of them with the word “microwave” in the title. But these books were mainly about minimizing cooking—throwing together various convenience foods for a fast meal. Starting about a decade ago, there have emerged excellent, rigorous cookbooks focusing on everyday fare for the casual cook.

Deborah Madison, with her Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone, and Mark Bittman, with his Minimalist books and his How to Cook Everything magnum opus, are the beacons of this new wave of home cooking: time-conscious, technique-oriented, and green-minded (meat, when it isn’t dispensed with altogether, plays a supporting role to dishes centered on fresh produce and whole grains).

But even if Madison and Bittman dominate this section of the cookbook shelf, I’ll still be making room for Suzie Middleton’s new book, Fast, Fresh, & Green. For years, Middleton served as the editor of the excellent Fine Cooking magazine, which deftly combines high-ambition, “master”-level recipes with everyday food. Unshackled from the magazine grind, Middleton has delivered a terrific cookbook, particularly for those in the steep part of cooking’s endless learning curve.

Experienced cooks might be put off by the book’s stated premise. Explaining her method, Middleton writes: “So, my weeknight vegetable improvisation goes like this: 1) I pick my cooking method. 2) I pick my vegetables. 3) I pick my flavorings. 4) I start chopping.”

I can’t imagine thinking like that. I start with what’s on hand or ready in the garden. If I’m shopping for produce, I buy what looks most appealing—and then I start thinking about cooking methods and flavor palates. I suspect most experienced, seasonal-minded cooks think in similar ways.

But you know what? Experienced cooks should forget the book’s premise and just dig into the recipes. Got a bunch of asparagus on hand? Consult the index and alight upon “Quick-braised Asparagus with Dijon, White Wine, and Fresh Thyme Pan Sauce.” I tried it a few weeks ago, and the result was pretty terrific: rustic, pungent, and bright all at once. And even if you don’t have all the ingredients on hand, the technique—brown the asparagus in butter, and then braise it lightly in a flavorful liquid—is inspiring. It broke me out of the asparagus rut in which I’ve languished for oh, 10 years now, in which I either roast or steam it, serving it with aioli. Many other such fresh ideas abound in the book.

Where I think it will really gain traction is among new cooks. Its chapters are based not on ingredients or courses, but rather on techniques: “quick-roasting,” “quick-braising,” “hands-on sauteing,” “walk-away sauteing,” and so on. Each of the nine chapters that form the meat of the book contains a brisk explanation explaining how the technique works, followed by a “foundation recipe” for putting into action. Then come a dozen or so variations on the main theme, all unfussy and manageable for an evening in the middle of a busy week.

Any aspiring cook would be well advised to work through the “foundation recipes” chapter by chapter. In contrast to the exacting doyennes under whose cookbook tutelage I labored under in the ‘90s—I’m thinking of you  Marcella Hazen, Diana Kennedy, and Paula Wolfert, my heroes—Middleton’s voice is gentle, encouraging, and geared to making cooks feel empowered to improvise.

That’s critical. I doubt if many people can sustain a run of casual everyday cooking without feeling good about improvising. Only on so many Tuesdays will hardworking people consent to slogging through a recipe to get dinner on the table. After a certain point, weighed down by exhaustion from the day’s labor and the prospect of dirty dishes to come, you either gain the ability to size up a set of ingredients and think through their pathway to a meal—or you revert to takeout and heat-and-serve.

With her new book, Middleton has emerged as an appealing shepherd, capable of guiding people from the ruins of bad convenience fare to the splendor of confident, quotidian cooking. And she has more than a few tricks to teach us old kitchen dogs, too.

Related Links:

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The best books about the deep blue sea, just in time for World Oceans Day

We are a premier, luxury catering company in Chicago, looking for a ‘rock star chef’ to head our culinary program. We have a strong team, and six years of success to build upon. Our operations, communications and commitment to our employees is unique in our industry. Read further to see if you are the right candidate for us.

General Questions
Do you have fine dining experience?
Do you have off-premise experience?
Do you enjoy appearing in the media, print and television?
Do you have any entrepreneurial experience?
Or the desire to be entrepreneurial without taking on the risk?
Do you enjoy a fast paced energetic day, alternating with quiet days to plan and create?
Do you enjoy interacting with clients?
Are you interested in performing cooking demonstrations?

Food Questions
Are you interested in new culinary challenges daily?
Never again working a static, boring menu?
Creating a list of favorite and classic dishes and tailoring them to fit a client’s taste?
Using sustainable, local foods whenever possible?
Working with exciting flavor and texture combinations?
Colorful composed plates and platters?
Interesting garnish ideas?
Creating an environment where respect is a key focus?
Participating in a strong team where front and back of the house communications are valued?
Creating menus with international and creative themes?
Do you like to be a hands-on chef as well as a great administrator and leader?
Do you miss actually cooking?

Kitchen Management Questions
Do you like to cultivate and educate the chefs you work with?
Do you choose to surround yourself with a strong team, chefs and cooks whose strengths fill in your weaknesses?
Is your kitchen a quiet, professional place, with respectful communications?
Are you open to feedback and willing to learn about business?
Are you detail oriented and able to be creative and cost conscious at the same time?
Are you able to take responsibility and accountability for your department?

Please submit a resume and a cover letter introducing yourself and explaining how you fit the criteria above.

Last month we reported that the Environmental Working Group had updated its annual database of farm subsidy payments. That announcement paired strange bedfellows in the call for subsidy reform in the next Farm Bill. The news conference to announce the updated database included comments from representatives with EWG, the Center for Rural Affairs and, "somewhat oddly, the libertarian Cato Institute," David Bennett of Delta Farm Press reports. "This is a really good area for EWG and the Cato Institute, which may not seem like natural partners, to come together," said Sallie James, policy analyst for the libertarian institute. "Those of us in favor of limited government see this as a great area for reform."

While James classified EWG's database as a tool that helps with Cato's efforts, EWG representatives called for subsidy money to be shifted to conservation efforts, not cut entirely. James even called for the Tea Party movement to become active in the fight for farm subsidy reform, saying the movement "sweeping the nation talks about ‘limited government’ and ‘get the government out of my business.’ I would really hope that so-called conservatives and Republican leaders that talk about the need for government to get out of people’s lives would agree that (reaches) to farm programs, as well as other areas."

The Nebraska-based Center for Rural Affairs, a generally liberal group, cited a failure to revitalize family farming or rural communities as reason for farm-subsidy reform, Bennett writes. Chuck Hassebrook, executive director of CRA, said one reason for that ineffectiveness is "Essentially, we have a farm program that says 'The bigger you get without limit, the more money you get from the federal government.'"

Craig Cox, head of agricultural programs for EWG, also took aim at crop insurance as an area in need of reform. Crop Insurance "has many of the same flaws as countercyclical programs," he said. "How much risk are taxpayers picking up? What are the implications of that? What sort of incentives does that create? Is this really a level playing field or is the way these insurance programs are structured inordinately subsidizing a handful of crops? Clearly they do — four major commodity crops account for 80 percent of the crop insurance subsidies." (Read more)

Are you an Embedded Software Engineer with 2 to 5 years of experience, looking for a great opportunity to work with a variety of technologies, with the opportunity to grow into a supervisory postion in the next year or two? Do you have experience with communications protocols such as SAE J1939 and ISO 14230?
Are you a hands-on person who understands how the hardware interfaces with the code you create? Are you a detail and quality oriented person, who takes it personally if there are mistakes in your released code?
If you answered yes to all of these questions, we would like to meet with you.

ISSPRO, Inc. is a leader in the automotive instrumentation industry. We work with motion control techniques controlling stepper motors for gauge pointers, and J1939 and other communications protocols to interface with complete vehicle systems. We develop PC applications for user configuration of options, and are developing new graphical display interfaces. We work closely with our customers in the OEM automotive, military, marine and auto racing industries.

Please send your resume to judy@isspro.com
ISSPRO, Inc. is an Equal Opportunity Employer

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Some say they are the holy grail of parallel computing and PWJ is the basis for a shared nothing system and the only join method that is available on a shared nothing system (yes this is oversimplified!). The magic in Oracle is of course that is one of many ways to join data. And yes, this is the old flexibility vs. simplicity discussion all over, so I won't go there... the point is that what you must do in a shared nothing system, you can do in Oracle with the same speed and methods.

The Theory

A partition wise join is a join between (for simplicity) two tables that are partitioned on the same column with the same partitioning scheme. In shared nothing this is effectively hard partitioning locating data on a specific node / storage combo. In Oracle is is logical partitioning.

If you now join the two tables on that partitioned column you can break up the join in smaller joins exactly along the partitions in the data. Since they are partitioned (grouped) into the same buckets, all values required to do the join live in the equivalent bucket on either sides. No need to talk to anyone else, no need to redistribute data to anyone else... in short, the optimal join method for parallel processing of two large data sets.

PWJ's in Oracle

Since we do not hard partition the data across nodes in Oracle we use the Partitioning option to the database to create the buckets, then set the Degree of Parallelism (or run Auto DOP - see here) and get our PWJs. The main questions always asked are:

1. How many partitions should I create?
2. What should my DOP be?

In a shared nothing system the answer is of course, as many partitions as there are nodes which will be your DOP. In Oracle we do want you to look at the workload and concurrency, and once you know that to understand the following rules of thumb.

Within Oracle we have more ways of joining of data, so it is important to understand some of the PWJ ideas and what it means if you have an uneven distribution across processes.

Assume we have a simple scenario where we partition the data on a hash key resulting in 4 hash partitions (H1 -H4). We have 2 parallel processes that have been tasked with reading these partitions (P1 - P2). The work is evenly divided assuming the partitions are the same size and we can scan this in time t1 as shown below.

Now assume that we have changed the system and have a 5th partition but still have our 2 workers P1 and P2. The time it takes is actually 50% more assuming the 5th partition has the same size as the original H1 - H4 partitions.

In other words to scan these 5 partitions, the time t2 it takes is not 1/5th more expensive, it is a lot more expensive and some other join plans may now start to look exciting to the optimizer. Just to post the disclaimer, it is not as simple as I state it here, but you get the idea on how much more expensive this plan may now look...

Based on this little example there are a few rules of thumb to follow to get the partition wise joins.

First, choose a DOP that is a factor of two (2). So always choose something like 2, 4, 8, 16, 32 and so on...

Second, choose a number of partitions that is larger or equal to 2* DOP.

Third, make sure the number of partitions is divisible through 2 without orphans. This is also known as an even number...

Fourth, choose a stable partition count strategy, which is typically hash, which can be a sub partitioning strategy rather than the main strategy (range - hash is a popular one).

Fifth, make sure you do this on the join key between the two large tables you want to join (and this should be the obvious one...).

Translating this into an example:

DOP = 8 (determined based on concurrency or by using Auto DOP with a cap due to concurrency) says that the number of partitions >= 16.

Number of hash (sub) partitions = 32, which gives each process four partitions to work on. This number is somewhat arbitrary and depends on your data and system. In this case my main reasoning is that if you get more room on the box you can easily move the DOP for the query to 16 without repartitioning... and of course it makes for no leftovers on the table...

And yes, we recommend up-to-date statistics. And before you start complaining, do read this post on a cool way to do stats in 11.