Aug 12, 2008
12:55 pm »
On branding
Leo Laporte’s This Week in Tech featured some thoughts from Jason Calacanis, founder of Weblogs, Inc. (Engadget et. al.) and Mahalo, on branding. Craigslist, the venerable classified ad service, blocked a site called Craigsfindr which searched all of the Craigslist sites at once. From Craigslist’s standpoint, it doesn’t matter that this is “adding value” to their website—they don’t want somebody scraping their data and taking it out of their sandbox, period.
This led to discussion of why, in the past decade, somebody hasn’t built something “better” than CL. One can argue that the Web 1.0-ness of Craigslist is a feature, not a bug, but it’s not hard to imagine genuine improvements to the searching and cataloging functions, not to mention the potential benefits of a (moderately) open API. So why hasn’t that happened? To do a rough transcript from the episode:
Jason: In order to get people to switch a service, it’s going to require hitting them somewhere between three and seven times with a marketing message, it’s going to require having a product which is 50%, 100% better. You can’t just make it 10% better. There’s zero switching cost, theoretically—you just type in a different domain name—but it means you have to market the heck out of it to displace it. If someone wanted to start “This Seven Days in Tech” and it was a show that was twice as good, it’s gonna take them a couple years to do it.
Leo: Thank God! […] Didn’t Tom Peters say that a product, to supplant another product, has to be not twice as good, not three times as good, but ten times as good as an established brand? You know what you have. Why take the chance unless I can see a significant improvement? And Craigslist does the job.
I couldn’t help but think about this in relation to some discussion I’ve been in on two friends’ journals recently, which those of you who read some of the same LiveJournals I do will have no doubt seen—the discussions about art archive sites. It was asserted that the “Big Brand” in our fandom isn’t very good. It isn’t: the software is slow, fragile and under-featured, and one might argue that spending $16K in donations on a new system with three single points of failure is, shall we say, sub-optimal. So why, my friends asked, aren’t better alternatives succeeding?
Honestly? I think Laporte and Calacanis nailed it. Here’s my own takeaway bullet points; visualize PowerPoint slides if it feels more Web 2.0 for you that way.
FA provided the right service at the right time: they took the deviantArt model of a gallery merged with social networking (home pages, blogs, comments, watch lists) and targeted it squarely at this fandom. It turned out a strong demand wasn’t being met. Whether or not you think FA met it well, before they started nobody else was meeting it at all. Yerf was dead, FurNation was in shambles, VCL remained state of the art for 1994, and dA was perceived as hostile.
But in barely more than a year, everything had completely changed; when you have no competition, going from zero to majority market share is easy. Anyone post-FA doesn’t have that opportunity. A “competing” site has to succeed at what Calacanis outlined above. Are any of them?
“Significant” improvement is subjective, but the responses I saw suggested that by and large people didn’t feel the new sites were two or three—let alone ten—times as good as FA.
ArtSpots is, to me, the best gallery site both technically and in terms of “added value” service, but it’s made a conscious choice to limit its content in both form and rating. I don’t see this as a problem, but limits are limits. If you’re a writer, AS isn’t even under consideration; if you’re an artist who does both all-ages and mature work, you can just put it all on FA.
The wincingly-acronymed Furry Art Pile has an innovative approach to organization, but based on what people were saying in discussion, “different” isn’t translating to “better” for most people. It may not be translating to worse, either, but just being different isn’t good enough.
YiffStar has an art gallery in addition to their story archive, and they also have a second domain, AnthroStar, which essentially filters the porn out. (Did you know that? I didn’t either, but that goes with the next “slide” about marketing.) But there’s no compelling technical reason to switch from FA to YS; the gallery features seem less about expanding YS’s audience than about expanding the services for their existing audience. That’s a big audience, mind you, but so is FA’s—and my comments about FAP three bullet points down apply here, too.
Back to Calacanis: “hit [the audience] with a marketing message” means getting a banner, an AdWords ad, a press release, something that makes the case for checking the site out in front of people’s faces, and “three to seven times” means just that: you can’t just do it once or twice, you have to keep doing it. You might object that in this fandom word of mouth is the real advertising, but two points. One, there are places to advertise just to the fandom, from web sites to con books. And two, if the discussion here or on
![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif)
tilton’s journal was the first time you’d heard of ArtSpots or FAP or AnthroStar, what does that say about their name recognition?
And last but not least, two personal observations:
With the exception of YS, all of these sites—even FA—are comparatively new, and as outlined above, FA has a tremendous “first mover” advantage now. Even if FAP did everything right it would take years to build up significant mind share. And even though it’s doing some seriously cool technical stuff behind the scenes, FAP’s interface and marketing could both use work.
FurAffinity has positioned itself as allowing erotica without explicitly (ha!) promoting it. By contrast, FAP says: hey, we know you’re really here for the porn, have a front page full of tags that sound a touch fetishy even when you’re not logged in and seeing the really “adult” stuff. Yes, I know that the audience for porn is huge—but from a marketing perspective, “we have everything including porn” trumps “we have porn and also clean stuff.”
So here’s the two million-dollar questions, figuratively speaking:
What would a site have to offer to be better enough to get people to switch?
What would be the best ways for that site to get sufficient name recognition to bring in the switchers?
Aug 8, 2008
9:52 am »
Writing, work and whisky
Work has calmed down, to the degree that the SaaS project I’ve been working on passed its demo milestone and indeed its first demo. This doesn’t mean things stop, not by any stretch, but it does mean that I have a chance to catch my breath.
The first three days of this week were a highwater mark of suck for me, at least for the last 12 months or so. I wouldn’t think I’d miss the lonely melancholia of my last journal entry, but the combination of hair-pulling bugs the first two days with a traffic ticket on Wednesday (for an “unsafe lane change,” a subjective charge I don’t agree with, but never mind) had me nearly in tears by Wednesday afternoon. Wednesday evening was one of the few times I can remember drinking with the hopes of getting sufficiently tipsy to destress, a success achieved with a mai tai, a rye and soda and a Kahlua-spiked coffee. Are two strong drinks and a nightcap all that’s necessary to get me tipsy? That night, apparently, even though I’ve had more alcohol at other points to less effect. I’ll chalk that up to stress as well.
Yesterday, Thursday, was better; work was essentially stone quiet for me, the product demo went off apparently with no significant glitches elsewhere, a restaurant I’d been waiting for months to open (the Oaxacan Kitchen in Palo Alto) was yesterday, and I bought two expensive things: a Canon PowerShot G9 and a bottle of Laphroaig 10 Year “Cask Strength” single malt whisky. I’m somewhat worried that both of these purchases were a response to stress, but I’ve actually been thinking about the G9 for months specifically for the upcoming trip, and “learn about single malt” has been a low-level to do item for years. (Although honestly, the choice to learn about single malt this week? Yeah, stress response.)
Today also promises to be quiet. I’ve decided to try and update my personal website, making it something more of a project showcase than it is, and likely putting more stories online there. This raises some interesting issues to chew on with respect to making “in print” stories available for free online; while my first instinct has always been that you don’t put stuff you still want to be able to sell up on web sites, there’s a lot of evidence to the contrary, from the Baen Free Library to everything Cory Doctorow does to haikujaguar’s writing experiments right here on LiveJournal. My growing suspicion is that putting a good chunk of Why Coyotes Howl online, for instance, is going to either have no effect on book sales or slightly increase it, and that having a three-month “exclusive window” for stories that get publication in periodicals is, barring contractual obligations, sufficient. Of course, I still want the print work to sell and my gut feeling is that “but it’s print! dude!” isn’t in and of itself sufficient for most buyers, so I’ll be chewing on that, too.
I’d like to have that website updated before the Eurofurence trip, but I don’t know how likely that is, because it’s occurring to me that said trip is in just over two weeks and it will behoove me to have some idea what the hell I’m going to do for an author reading. If anybody has any “you should read that story” suggestions, I’m open.
Jul 20, 2008
2:58 pm »
Connection time versus chill time
As I’ve written before, it’s a busy time at work. I feel sheepish complaining, given how many friends I have who’ve had much tougher periods at their tech jobs. But my crunch time has been just enough to keep me off-balance. As inadvertent demonstration, I started writing this on Thursday at lunch and didn’t get back to it until Sunday afternoon. The product I’m working on had its internal demo on Friday, which was an important milestone, but there’s still a small flotilla of bugs and feature requests, and at the moment my best bug tracker is my personal copy of OmniOutliner.
On Thursday I wrote that I think I’m missing “chill time,” time to just sit around without any expectations. When I used to go out driving long distances for trivial reasons, engage in what I called (without as much facetiousness as you might think) driving Zen, that was a way to get chill time; I didn’t see any reason why I’d give that up, but I didn’t see $4.50/gallon gas getting here quite as soon as it did, either. Yesterday I set out on BART to Richmond, with the expectation of catching the Capitol Corridor train to Sacramento, but that didn’t happen; instead I ended up in Berkeley, meeting a friend who lives and works in the East Bay who I should probably see at least marginally more often.
I’ve written recently that I need to see friends more often in general; in a way this is unusual for me. I’ve never considered myself antisocial but I’ve never had a real desire to go out and connect. But over the last couple of months, that desire’s been strong. One might even say desperate. I hate the thought that I’m having a weirdly inverted midlife crisis, but it’s hard to escape: if my path had gone more conventionally, then about now—give or take a year—my child would be preparing to go off to college. Instead of getting a divorce and a red BMW, I’m suddenly pining for a marriage and a minivan.
Of course, as I’m writing this, I’m acutely aware that I’m also behind on personal projects, and that calls for staying at home and, well, being antisocial. That’s an interesting Catch-22, isn’t it? Recently I learned of another Quasi-Secret Project™ to make a writing archive site that sounds… well, not too far off from what I was thinking of with Claw & Quill. While part of me has a predictable competition! I must drop everything and get going on mine! reaction, the truth is that I want to do C&Q because I want a site like it myself and I just don’t think anyone else has done it right. I know other work these folks have done, though, and give them a very high Getting It Right chance. Does it make more sense for me to give them a list of demands see if I can work with them in some fashion, even if only to say, “Well, here’s what I was thinking, see if you think it makes any sense?” My gut feeling is yes; I’ll see if anything develops.
This doesn’t mean I’m out of personal projects to work on, of course, not by any stretch. I have reading to do for my writing group, writing to do for my writing group, and a couple other ideas I’m kicking around which I could actually bump up in the stack if I’m able to push C&Q off.
One minor downside if I start resuming personal projects: I’m realizing that the chair that I’m sitting in now sort of hurts. I’m going to fiddle around with the adjustments yet again, but I may end up breaking down and finally getting a Herman Miller chair. For now, though, I think my ambition’s a little more modest: an afternoon drink and a push to actually move forward on some stories again, or plot out a little more of one of those programming projects, or… something.
Jul 11, 2008
1:58 pm »
Phrases I Would Be Happy To Not Hear Again This Election Cycle
- Flip-Flop
- Throw under the bus
- Maverick
- Elitist
- Middle America
- Played the
$Xcard - Family values
- Give them the tools they need
- Agent of change
- Rock star (referring to anyone who is, in fact, not a musician)
(A hat tip to Official Disgruntled Blogger John Cole, whose much longer list this is culled from.)
Jul 4, 2008
10:37 pm »
Fourth of July
I spent a chunk of the day over at tugrik’s, doing 4th of July BBQ things and re-meeting a bunch of folks I see too sporadically—Frang, smackjackal, tilton, higginsdragon, Baron, smudge_dragon and more. A good thing, overall. I may have a few conversations to follow up on specifically, even—but what I’d mostly like to do is just keep in actual (gasp) face-to-face contact more than I have been in general. I’ll see how that goes. (If I sound skeptical, it’s of me holding up my end of that, to be clear!)
I got back to Foster City in time to run down to the park where the fireworks were at and attempt to take photos. No idea how they turned out—I have no real clue how to take shots of fireworks, so if they’re not just all blurs and/or complete blackness, I’ll be happy.
And I am now celebrating with what I’m arbitrarily dubbing the Coyote Cadillac Margarita, inaugurating a new bottle of tequila along the way. The recipe:
- ¼ oz. simple syrup
- ¾ oz. fresh lime juice
- 1 oz. Gran Gala orange liqueur
- ¼ oz. curacao
- 1¾ oz. Partida Blanco tequila
Yes, it looks kinda complicated, but I have a 2 oz. measuring cup in ¼-oz. gradiations—add the simple syrup and fill it up to the 1 oz. line with the lime juice, and do the curacao and tequila the same way. (My normal version leaves out the curacao and just has 1½ ounces of tequila. You can of course change the alcohol types, but don’t use cheap-ass triple sec, do use fresh-squeezed lime juice, and remember that any tequila with the word “gold” in its name sucks. You don’t have to get an ultra-premium one, but you want one that says it’s 100% agave, either “blanco” or “reposado.”)
Jul 2, 2008
8:11 am »
Life on Mars, or at least Foster City
The last few weeks I’ve been reminded that yes, I am working for a Silicon Valley startup. We’ll just say things have been busy, and on weekends I’m usually inclined to be doing something that either doesn’t involve being in front of the computer or at least requires no thought. (Standard plug: one can follow me on Twitter or FriendFeed as “chipotlecoyote.” I’ve seen utilities that let you echo Twitter messages to your LiveJournal, which I hereby solemnly swear to never use.)
There’s many things I like about living in the San Mateo area. I like San Jose, but in terms of “urban cool,” the Peninsula wins. Mountain View, Palo Alto, Burlingame, San Mateo itself—and of course now BART is just about 10 minutes away, which opens up a huge chunk of the rest of the Bay Area. I’ve regularly gone not only into San Francisco but to Berkeley and Walnut Creek via rail.
What’s not so cool, though, is that it’s been somewhat isolating. Most of the people I know are in the South Bay. While 25 miles isn’t that far to travel, I’m no longer quite a “local.” I don’t get together with folks very often. I don’t think to call people (or IM or SMS or whatever) to ask what’s up when movies open or guests are in town, which means I’m often reading about get-togethers after they happen. While this can lead to a certain sense of paranoia, I’m pretty lousy at initiating contact myself. Some of that’s longstanding social paralysis; most of it is, I fear, that out of sight, out of mind works both ways. “Oh yeah, I should get together with $X” flits through my mind occasionally, but all too often keeps right on flitting.
So as a general thought: hey, if you’re a friend in the local area, I should get together with you more often. (If you’re a friend in a long-distance area, I should probably get together with you more often, too, but that’s trickier.)
Jun 22, 2008
7:38 pm »
No novels
For whatever reason, today I’m finding my head filled with abandoned novels. My abandoned novels, that is.
There’s three I can think of off-hand. One is (in)famous in small circles, a science fiction novel called In Our Image. Another is an untitled fantasy story in a world of dragons and humans, started during National Novel Writing Month a few years ago. The third is yet another science fiction novel, set more in the far future, whose only public face so far has been a short piece for “Rabbit Hole Day” (also a few years back).
Actually, I could count other even more dimly remembered ones from my far past. The short story “Only With Thine Eyes” was originally intended to lead into a novel. (At times I suspect it, Image and the far future one referenced above are all failed attempts at grappling with the same theme, but I’m not positive of that.) All the way back in high school I was working on a dreadful fantasy novel which I think might be my longest incomplete work to date: I think it hit around 40,000 words. And I suspect I’m missing a couple other ones in there that never got past scribbled notes. If so, the chances are good they’re no longer with me at all—I don’t think I have any word processing files that go back earlier than the mid-’90s, when I was using Nota Bene (whose file format is thankfully just marked-up ASCII, not too dissimilar from HTML).
I’ve long wondered at my inability to actually pull off novel-length pieces. I’m comfortable enough with the novella length; my recent stories of 3-5,000 words are unusually short for me. Yet actually developing a full novel has never worked out for me.
Today I had a possible insight, as I was going back over Image and yet again lamenting my problems with telling Tara’s story. The problem may be that I’m not following the advice I give others about storytelling: stop world-building.
This is difficult to follow for people who’ve grown up with science fiction and fantasy, especially if you played a lot of role-playing games, which are often all about the world-building. If you played D&D in the ’80s, the chances are you knew at least knew one Dungeon Master who had hundreds of pages of maps and histories and ethnographic studies and political analyses of his own fantasy world. (Maybe you were that Dungeon Master.) You wanted to have a rich and “complete” world for the players to explore, and that meant knowing lots and lots and lots of crap that probably they’d only scratch the surface of unless the adventuring in that world went on for decades.
RPGs condition us to think of authors as Game Masters—there are even RPGs that refer to GMs as “Storytellers,” right? But the thing is, storytelling doesn’t actually work that way, because you know where the characters are going. You actually only need the part of the world built that they’re in. If the characters are never going to that fantastic trade city on the other side of the continent, you only need to know as much about it as affects the story. That might be as little as the city’s name. It might be as little as, well, nothing at all.
I understand that writing about the histories of these lands may be a whole lot of fun. They can be really cool! But if they don’t even ephemerally influence the story about your characters, they’re not relevant. This is, like it or not, an inescapable truth. I have met more than a few writers in various fandoms over the years who never actually write the novel they’re creating their great universe for. They know everything about that universe, let me tell you.
Except a good story to tell in it.
So. I think the problem I’ve had with more than one of these is that I don’t really know the story that I want to tell. In Our Image is Tara’s story, at least at first, but does it stay Tara’s story? The implications are clearly that her story will have a profound influence on the whole society around her, but how wide-angle a lens do I want on that, and where does the story actually end? (I’ve been accused of “not writing endings” on occasion, usually by people who, I suspect, are upset that there’s clearly more that could be told past where I stopped. Yet there’s always more that could be told past where one stops.) The dragon novel set up a few interesting characters—both dragon and human—but ultimately I really didn’t have much idea why the characters were in conflict, what the stakes were. And the far future novel with the bioengineered wolf girl? Holy crap. I got thousands of words of notes about the setting and about sweeping political conflicts, but I’m not sure I even know the main character’s name, much less what her motivations are or just what she’s embroiled in besides, uh, something involving those sweeping political conflicts.
Does knowing this problem—assuming my analysis is correct—help me solve it? I’m not sure about it. Frankly, I shouldn’t try to solve it quite yet anyway; I have to resume work on A Gift of Fire, A Gift of Blood version 2 before seeing if any of these are resurrectable. But I think if I do go back to any of them—or, God help me, get another idea for a novel-length work—I’m going to try to keep the scope pretty tightly focused on the main characters, and try to avoid learning things about their world that ultimately aren’t going to help me tell their stories.
Jun 13, 2008
6:14 pm »
Random quick updates
In no particular order…
Work is kicking my ass recently. It’s been an interesting experience, in the oh, yes, I am at a startup, aren’t I? sort of sense. It’s made writing difficult and driven out enthusiasm for personal coding, though, and also rather cut down on my time online.
On a not entirely unrelated note, I’m about ready to throw in the towel with the Excursion Society MUCK. I’ve had little time for it over the last year and honestly not all that much enthusiasm, even though I appreciate the diehards who’ve stuck with it; it’s mostly still around just because of them. I may think more on other systems to do in the future, like an MU* set in Ranea. (After I get my other programming projects back on track. After I’m willing to do programming on my own time again.)
I keep starting and stopping other blogs around the web, because I’m just like that. It occurred to me that if there’s any topic I really should be writing about somewhere, it’s not politics or programming or even fiction writing, it’s cocktails. If this thought goes anywhere, I’ll let you know.
I contemplated the “blog like it’s the end of the world” zombie thing that’s going on today, but ya know, it seemed like it would be too much effort for today. (And besides, I already wrote an apocalyptic plague story recently.)
Speaking of cocktails, I’m really tempted to go to Elixir tonight or the weekend, but probably won’t. Probably.
May 24, 2008
9:33 am »
Eurofurence
As a quick note, it looks like they publicly announced this so I can go ahead and mention it myself. I've mentioned I'm planning to attend Eurofurence this year; actually, I'm going as a guest of honor, along with Steve Gallacci. I'm pretty excited about it, although at the moment I'm off on vacation and coming down with a cold at the same time, it seems, so now that I've shared this I go back to being miserable while looking like I'm having a good time!May 21, 2008
10:31 pm »
Lack of updates
I realize it’s become something of a cycle for me to go several weeks without posting here and then make a post which mostly consists of an apology about how little I’m posting. I’m going to try to stop doing that. Which is not to say I’m going to make an immediately-to-be-broken vow to post more; I’m just going to try to stop apologizing for it.
It feels to me like I’m posting a lot, but that’s one of the combined virtues and vices of Twitter. While I’m tempted to engage in a defense of Twitter, those who want to read a much better one than I could muster can read Rands’ “We Travel in Tribes”:
Via the LazyWeb convention, I expect reasonable, informed, and quick answers to most any question. Where I used to use Google, I now use Twitter for questions, because not only do I get the answer, I also get the opinion. And sometimes I get my world rocked with random, psychic, off-the-cuff, tangential information that Google will never give me because Google doesn’t know who I am.
My own use of Twitter is more prosaic, granted. I’ve had conversations on it, I’ve asked questions (and gotten responses), and I’ve learned a few interesting things. Mostly, though, it’s where the minutiae of my life ends up going these days: stuff that I’d like to share but not enough to write a journal post about.
This does leave me wondering what to actually write about here. I’ve done essays on occasion and I suspect I still will. I’ve sometimes tried to start other blogs elsewhere—a link blog, a tech blog, a political blog (twice)—and all of them have been false starts. I may try to resurrect the link blog, but, y’know, I may not. Tech stuff might as well go here. Political stuff I tend to be reticent to get into. I’m interested in discussing politics but not so much arguing politics; attempts to merely talk about current events a few years back left me feeling rather singed. Besides, looking for things to be outraged about has decidedly limited appeal.
At any rate, I’d like to commit to writing something weekly, but I’m not going to—not yet, at least.
What’s been going on? Work, mostly, and mostly office work. I haven’t gotten appreciably farther on Gift of Fire, nor on the new Claw & Quill software. At the beginning of the month I visited shaterri, quarrel and ladyperegrine in Seattle, which was a wonderful if slightly whirlwind visit. (I have a photo album of that you can visit if you’re so inclined: “Seattle” is the main one, with a food porn type one of the visit to The Herbfarm taken on the iPhone.) Starting tomorrow evening, my mother will be in town to visit for the long weekend; we’ll be staying in Emeryville for no specific reason other than availability and the likelihood of exploring some of the Oakland area, which actually has a lot of interesting there there.