Disruptive Conversations

There are no words... although many are being written.

On an intellectual level, perhaps, we knew it was coming. When he stepped down as CEO back in August, we knew Steve Jobs was in trouble. No one who is as much of a control freak as he was would step down unless things were really not going well.

But still...

... emotionally we hoped against hopes that His Jobsness would somehow cheat death and stand up on stage yet again to give us...

"one more thing"

... one more time.

But... icon, visionary, leader, maker that he was... he was of course only human.

With all the mortality that implies.

And so ever since the word of his death started spreading last night, the Internet has been awash with the collective cries of anguish.

Techmeme, at this precise moment, is a wall of tributes to the man.

Many are incredibly moving... incredibly poignant... incredibly powerful...

"#ThankYouSteve" has been at the top of the Twitter trends. Google has changed its home page to have a link over to Apple's page. Wired has turned its home page into a wall of quotes about Jobs.

Everywhere a thousand other tributes are being posted.

A powerful day of tributes to a man who did so much to change our industry and indeed our world.

I don't know that I can personally add more than what I wrote back in August...

Thank you, Steve Jobs.

He leaves us with a legacy of design...

... of remembering that we need to focus on form as much as function (if not indeed more)...

... of thinking not of what features we need to add to a product or service, but rather what features we need to remove to make the service even simpler and easier to use...

... of remembering to focus on the user experience...

... on the need to embrace the "magic" of what we are doing and to create products and services that truly amaze and delight us...

... and to not settle and to live each day as if it were our last.

If you have never watched his powerful address at Stanford in 2005, take 15 minutes and watch this video:

One of Apple's best known advertising campaigns was the "Think different" series - and they had videos with a narration about "Here's to the Crazy Ones". The folks at 9to5 Mac found a version that Steve Jobs himself narrated:

Naturally, there have been several remixes of this commercial text (although not Jobs' narration) with images from Jobs' history. Two I found moving were this one:

And this one from Gizmodo:

And yes, I admit to shedding a tear or two as I watched these...

There were a zillion tweets about Jobs... and one that I'll close with is simply this:

R.I.P., Steve Jobs.

Thank you.

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P.S. GigaOm ran a nice collection of quotes from Silicon Valley leaders.

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Today was a fascinating day to watch live-blogging services fail in a rather dramatic way.

Engadget... Gizmodo... MacRumors... ArsTechnica... and more...

Unless you were under a rock or otherwise hiding offline, you know that today was the big, huge, ginormous "iPhone 5" announcement event from Apple. (It turned out, of course, that there was no iPhone 5, but that didn't stop the media frenzy.)

As you probably also know, Apple does NOT live-stream these events. I think Robert Scoble nails their reasons - it's all about control. The PR folks at Apple are also masters at "creating spectacle". These "events" become the huge media events they are precisely because there is scarcity... you can't get the info unless you are in the room.

And so, the "media" get to be gatekeepers to the knowledge again.

Lacking a live video or audio stream, all the interested techies, media and fanboys must turn to live blogs and to Twitter (and Facebook and Google+) to get their updates.

But boy did those live blogs fail today!

Now, don't get me wrong..

I DO understand that providing live updates to an unknown - but very HIGH - number of visitors is hard to do.

I get that... but still it was interesting to see who survived and who didn't (and I mention both below).

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Live Blogs That Struggled

One of the first I saw go was MacRumors, who was originally using a service that embedded "live blogging" directly into their web page. That seemed to fail under the load and they dropped back to simply providing bullet updates on their live page.

I was watching Engadget's coverage for a while and it was great ... until it wasn't:

Even worse, the entire Engadget site seemed to be down at times:

The site went in and out during the course of the coverage but was mostly out for the latter half of the coverage.

Gizmodo's live blog didn't give the same kind of errors, but simply stopped updating for long periods ... and then had problems loading display elements (which I missed capturing):

Ars Technica did better with their coverage up until about 40 minutes into the event when they stopped updating the site and pointed people over to Twitter:

Their coverage came back... and then froze again several more times.

I would have loved to be watching the stats on the traffic these sites were getting as it had to have been a TON of traffic.

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Live Blogs That Worked

Still, some sites seemed to work well through it all. And while I have no insight into how much traffic these sites had versus the ones above, it could also be the architecture they chose to use as well as their choice of content.

Ryan Block's gdgt live gave the best experience I found, integrating both text and pictures to provide a great way to know what was going on:

They had a couple of momentary hiccups, but overall they seemed to consistently be publishing more and more content.

Mashable's live coverage was also consistently available, although they went with a more Twitter-esque series of mostly text updates. They added in polls for some more interactivity and also had links to other posts and info. They had a few photos, but not all that many compared to others. However, the coverage was consistent and always there:

Finally, GigaOm's coverage was noteworthy in that they started out from the beginning to just provide simple text updates to a blog post that you had to manually refresh. No auto-updates... no embedded widgets... just a straight-up blog post with a mixture of text and pictures. Not as sexy as other sites, but every time I refreshed it the content was there with updates.

Sometimes, simplicity can win.

(Now, in fairness, because there was no auto-updating and because I wasn't sitting there hitting the refresh (this was all running in the background on my computer while I ate lunch and was doing some other work), the GigaOm site could have gone down several times between my refreshes.)

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Again, I do realize that providing this kind of large-scale coverage is hard, but in the era of "web-scale" and with the availability of content delivery networks, caching services, etc., there are certainly options available to companies providing "live blogs" of events.

Now maybe some of the sites that "struggled" had all that kind of stuff in place and still succumbed to the overwhelming traffic.

Regardless, today was an interesting experiment in seeing what worked and what didn't work. Personally, I'd love it if some of the services that had technical difficulties would write up a bit about what happened and how they were hit.

It would help all of us learn how to scale our sites.

And help people get ready for the NEXT Apple event ;-)

P.S. And yes, there were undoubtedly other sites that were offering live blogs of the event... these were just the ones that I happened to know of or find.

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I recently discovered that the Social Media Club of NH will be meeting this Thursday, October 6th, over at my old stomping grounds of UNH in Durham, NH. The Eventbrite invitation has the full agenda and it looks quite intriguing. The first section is about how the Sexual Harassment and Rape Prevention Program (SHARPP) is interacting with students via social media for outreach... and having known some of the founders of that program way back in 1988, it's cool to see that not only is the program thriving but it's reaching out into new ways of communicating.

Second up is a session on Google+, which of course most all of us in the social media space are at least monitoring if not using (I'm of course on Google+).

It sounds like a great event and if you can get to the seacoast region there is still time to register.

Alas, I will not personally be there as I will be traveling back from speaking in Chicago on the 6th but I look forward to making it to some future SMCNH event.

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Do you reach out and grab your reader by the throat from the very first line of your text? Do you evoke some mystery or emotion in your first sentences that makes the reader NEED to learn more? Do you make them ask "WHY?" or "HUH?"

Three Examples of Powerful Openings

Recently in talking about this topic with someone I randomly grabbed three popular novels that I had nearby and to no surprise all three of them had powerful openings. Consider these examples:

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Foreign Influence by Brad Thor[1]

Inner Mongolia

The strategic military outpost was such a closely guarded secret it didn't even have a name, only a number - site 243.

It sat in a rugged windswept valley far away from cities and centers of industry. Its architecture was minimalist; a cross between a high-end refugee camp and a low-rent university. Tents, trailers and a handful of cheap concrete buildings made up its "campus." The only outward signs of modernity were the Pizza Hut, Burger King and Subway mobile restaurant trailers which made up the outpost's "food court."

It was just after three a.m. when the attack began. Lightweight Predator...

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Right away the use of "Inner Mongolia" means to most of us that it is somewhere very far away and remote. The first sentence immediately makes you wonder "what is so secret?" Who operates this base? What kind of "strategic military outpost" is it? The second paragraph is just a bit of description but then the third sentence drops you right into a conflict. Who is attacking it? Why?

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Angels & Demons by Dan Brown[1]

Physicist Leonardo Vetra smelled burning flesh, and he knew it was his own. He stared up in terror at the dark figure looming over him. "What do you want?"

"La chive," the raspy voice replied. "The password."

"But... I don't --"

The intruder pressed down again, grinding the white hot object deeper into Vetra's chew. There was the hiss of broiling flesh.

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That very first sentence immediately causes you to want to know "WHY?" Why is his flesh burning? Who is doing this? Who is this physicist? What is the password for? Who is the intruder? Why is flesh burning? Plus you have the evocative emotion of flesh burning, something against which we can all recoil in horror.

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A Storm of Swords by George R.R. Martin[1]

The day was grey and bitter cold, and the dogs would not take the scent.

The black bitch had taken one sniff at the bear tracks, backed off, and skulked back to the pack with her tail between her legs. The dogs huddled together miserably on the riverbank as the wind snapped at them. Chett felt it, too, biting through his layers of black wool and boiled leather. It was too bloody cold for man or beast, but here they were. His mouth twisted...

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The dogs would not take the scent... of what? Why are the dogs acting this way? What is causing this behavior? And for those who have been reading this series of books (this is book 3 of 5), who is this "Chett" character? And why are he and they out in this cold?

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Does Your Text Do This?

All three of these openings pull the reader in. From the very first lines you NEED to know more. You want to continue. You are hooked from the start.

Does your text do this?

Whether you are writing a news article, a book, a blog post, a novel, a short story... or whatever... do you hook your audience from the start?

If not, how can you change your piece so that you do hook them? Can you write a more powerful opening? Can you set up some mystery? Can you evoke some emotion?

How can you leave them wanting... indeed NEEDING... to read more?

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Image credit: Boris SV on Flickr

FTC Disclosure: These links to the books include my Amazon Associates ID and as a result if you actually were to purchase one of these books I might earn a few pennies. If you think this has anything whatsoever to do with me mentioning these books, I can assure you it doesn't.

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Shel and Neville were recording Monday's "For Immediate Release" podcast episode over the weekend, so my report has already been sent in. This week I covered:

• Mathew Ingram's great piece at GigaOm on "Why Facebook's Frictionless Sharing Is The Future"

• The release of the Amazon Kindle Fire and how it is potentially forking the Android operating system

• A brief discussion of Apple iOS5/iPhone5 launch rumored to be this week (Oct 4 or 5)

• The Release 1.0 of Status.Net, the open source microblogging software formerly known as "Laconi.ca" and powering the Identi.ca service - see more at Status.net

• A brief mention of a new site I am experimenting with to aggregate my content across the web.

Of course, to hear all of that, you'll need to tune into Monday's edition of the FIR podcast after Shel or Neville posts it. Enjoy!

I've long been a fan of the WordTwit plugin from BraveNewCode and used it on both Voxeo's blogs as well as my own to auto-tweet out new blog posts. Given that I write 99% of my blog posts offline (using MarsEdit) and send them to the blog site for posting, the fact that I couldn't configure the resulting auto-tweet in WordTwit was never really a big deal to me. Some of my Voxeo colleagues who used the WordPress editor, though, really wanted to be able to modify the auto-tweet.

Primarily they wanted to add hashtags, although sometimes they wanted to change the tweet to be different from the title of the post.

The BraveNewCode folks came out with WordTwit Pro back in June and with my chaotic summer I'd never really taken a look at it... but now that I have I admit to being quite impressed! This video gives a great tour:

I admit that what I personally find most interesting is the ability to automatically schedule multiple tweets. I know from my own reading of my Twitter stream that there is no way I can even remotely keep up with the stream... and so I only see things that happen to come by at any given time. I've often thought about auto-tweeting a blog post... and then tweeting it again maybe 8 or 12 hours later when a different group of people may be monitoring Twitter. This plugin now helps automate that.

I haven't installed it yet on my own site... but I'm definitely thinking of doing so...

I cringed a lot yesterday. It was a bit painful at times to watch Mark Zuckerberg's keynote presentation at Facebook's F8 conference yesterday.

Regarding the keynote, much is being written now about Facebook's new (and very cool) Timeline feature and about how the OpenGraph API encourages further sharing.

All that is very cool... but for me I found Zuckerberg's keynote interesting more in the human side.

In how it didn't work.

Zuckerberg made attempts at jokes... and at least on the live stream there was often no response - or at best a small smattering of applause.

More attempts. More crickets.

Awkward pauses at times when perhaps he thought there might be some reaction.

Over-repetition of key phrases perhaps because someone had coached him that he needed to say those phrases again.

It was all very... human.

Mark Zuckerberg has never pretended to be an amazing public speaker. He's an engineer... a techie... a geek. MUCH more comfortable talking about the details of some of the features than in making the jokes and surrounding contextual conversation ... or trying to connect with the audience.

And he's 27 years old.

And he was speaking to an audience of over 100,000 viewers of the live stream, X-thousand people at the F8 conference and through news and replays out to the millions of people who care about Facebook.

Just a wee bit of pressure. :-)

As a public speaker, I unfortunately can't usually sit back and just listen to a presentation... it's an inherent part of what I do that I'm always watching other speakers - listening to how they speak, watching how they move, listening to the words they use, looking at how they interact with the audience... just watching with a critical eye because that is how you become a better speaker.

And so I watched... and cringed when things didn't go the way he perhaps hoped.

We've all been there... sometimes presentations don't work the way you think they will. Jokes fall flat. Pictures don't resonate. Audiences don't interact. And it's all very well for me to sit here and comment... but I wasn't on the stage where he was... under the pressure he was...

In the end, the people watching were there to hear how Facebook was going to dramatically change the way people can interact with the site... and they got that info. Zuckerberg gave the demos, introduced the new features... all went well on that front.

And if Zuckerberg's stage presence seemed strained or awkward at times, it is perhaps a sign of his newness to this global stage upon which he finds himself. I respect him for getting out there and being that very public face of his company (as if he really had any choice). We're obviously only seeing the beginning of what Mark Zuckerberg will do in our communications industry... it will continue to be interesting to see where he goes - and indeed how he grows into presenting over the years ahead.

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These email notifications from Klout get a big, fat FAIL in my book:

I should NEVER be REQUIRED to go back to your website to get notifications about your service.

You have already interrupted my life by sending me an email. Now you want me to further interrupt my life to go to your website to see whatever brilliant piece of information you want to share with me?

FAIL

This is a classic mistake by new services. They want to get people to come back to their website. Once users go to their website, the service can then track the users' usage and also try to entice them to go into other areas of the service.

It may work for some services... but for many others it just services to piss off users. They may just ignore your email messages and your services... they may mark your email as "spam"... or they may write cranky blog posts like this one.

Here is a request to all the zillion new social services out there:

RESPECT MY TIME!

If you want me to use your service... and more importantly, if you want me to be a happy user of your service and promote it to other people, then follow this one simple step:

RESPECT MY TIME!

Send me a notification email WITH THE MESSAGE INCLUDED.

Facebook does this.

Twitter does this.

Google+ does this.

LinkedIn does this. (although I seem to recall they didn't at first, but that was years ago)

Every service should do this.

Don't make me go back to your website.

Respect my time.

Maybe I'll use your service more.... maybe I'll click back to your web site and respond or take other action. And yes, it might be a little less trackable... but you'll have happier users. (And people like me won't write cranky blog posts like this one. :-) )

Loved checking my email this morning and seeing this comment submitted to one of my posts on this blog:

Can you recommend a blog comment anti-span service? I've basically abandoned my blog because of all the comment spam.

The comment was, of course, spam!

The "name" of the commentor was "buy _____" (I'm not going to give them the dignity of saying what the product was), and the URL was a completely spammy URL.

You wonder if the person/people behind it understand the irony and are just out there somewhere chuckling wondering how many sites will actually post their comment as a legitimate comment...

P.S. And unfortunately TypePad did go ahead and publish this comment despite the spammy name and URL and so I had to remove the comment...

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Do you listen to the For Immediate Release Podcast? If so, do you have a few minutes to take the FIR listener survey if you haven't already done so?

The survey is a very important tool to help Shel and Neville (and by extension, we who are correspondents) shape the future of the FIR podcast. The feedback IS highly valued and much appreciated.

THE 2011 FIR LISTENER SURVEY CLOSES AT MIDNIGHT GMT ON SEPTEMBER 20!

So please, if you have a few minutes, help us out and complete the survey!

P.S. And if you are not an FIR listener but are interested in social media, why not give it a try now? Each week there is an hour-long show plus sometimes other interviews and book reviews. I'm always learning something new from all the great content!