In order to accept credit cards, you need a payment gateway and merchant account and some method of collecting credit card info (card machine, website, virtual terminal). All have fees and the entire chain needs to be PCI compliant, that is to say meet the security requirements of the Payment Card Industry.

A payment gateway is a service that connects your point of sale with your merchant account. A merchant account is a bank account that can accept credit card payments, as processed by your payment gateway. Sometimes these are combined in one service, most famously by Paypal in their various offerings.

The Simplest Way: Paypal and similar

The simplest way to get a merchant account and payment gateway is to sign up for a Paypal merchant account. Paypal actually offers two options

• Website Payments Pro which is basically a combined merchant account and gateway.
• Paypal Payflow Pro which is really just a gateway. Though it is still possible to choose Paypal as your merchant account, high-volume merchants can likely get better rates by connecting this to another merchant account.

Paypal’s offerings are actually quite a bit broader than that and it can get confusing and Paypal’s own site doesn’t help unless you have a lot of time and patience. Fortunately, Massimo has laid out the options and done an interview with a Paypal honcho to help merchants decide which offering makes the most sense. See his article on Website Payment Pro versus Payflow — a brief guide to Paypal services.

You can also get similar services from Google Checkout, but Google requires users to have a Google Account to use the service, so to me that’s only useful as an additional, not a primary option.

Other Gateway and Merchant Account options

There are a lot of other options. The 500-pound gorilla is Authorize.net. Often you can get Authorize.net access included in your merchant account fees. Other big players include Intuit Payment Solutions and Chase Paymentech. You can also get gateway access through merchant accounts from Costco or Sam’s Club (but see Braintree’s page about Costco Credit Card Processing Fees). Commonly, the gateway will be bundled with a merchant account. In fact, Authorize.net doesn’t even sell access directly. You have to go through a reseller.
Interestingly, it turns out that every reseller, according to their sales copy, offers incredibly low prices and great service compared to their competitors. In general, review sites are useless because, like for web hosting and other services, their “top choice” almost always means “top paying choice”, that is the provider that offers the reviewer the highest commission payout. There is one guy — Merchant Maverick —who offers no-holds-barred honest merchant account reviews. He doesn’t shy away from giving a provider a 1/5 rating and panning them. He also has a lot of great articles about fees and so forth.

As an alternative, TransFS has a merchant account auction system that in theory saves you money through competitive bidding. They also have a blog that’s worth reading. One final really useful feature of their site is a Paypal versus Merchant Account Fee Calculator. Note that though the link isn’t that obvious (grey on grey) look for the Options link to allow for comparison of Paypal Pro options compared to a traditional MA. It lets you adjust the balance between debit cards, standard and business credit cards and a few more options. Very useful! From this calculator, it looks like I’m spending an extra $30 per month. Not huge, but that’s $360 per year.

Finally, Startup Nation has a pretty good collection of articles on payment processing. This website is new to me, but it tends to be pitched to a non-expert audience with clear, simple explanations, but not perhaps the detail that you get int he Merchant Maverick articles. Typical would be their article on 7 Things to Look for in a Credit Card Processor. Though I mention it last, that’s probably a good place to start.

There’s a lot to balance. I like Braintree’s transparent fee structure, but at the same time, Braintree has a monthly minimum of $75 per month in transaction fees (not counting monthly service fees). Since our business is seasonal, we might not reach that threshhold some months, so we would need to compare it over a year of business.

PCI Compliance

Every merchant is required to meet basic security requirements, known as PCI Compliance, if they plan to accept credit cards. If you will transmit this information over the internet, whether because your swipecard machine connects via DSL or because you sell through a website, the requirements increase. If you plan to store customer data, the requirements increase substantially. As a very minimum, you’ll need a third-party security scan every three months. Large merchants can pay as much as $500,000 to come into PCI compliance, but even small merchants are looking at some significant costs, including, but not necessarily limited to:

• Scanning. Small merchants don’t typically require an on-site assessment, but can do a self-assessment questionnaire (SAQ) and have a third-party scan. Control Scan offers compliance scanning and breach protection for $150 per year, plus $100 per additional IP. Paypal has set something up with Control Scan to offer free scanning for the first year. Several other payment gateway and merchant account providers.
• Hosting. If you want to store customer card numbers, you’ll typically want two dedicated servers, one for your public-facing website and one for your database, put behind a firewall and protected from intrusion. Glowhost offers special PCI hosting packages that cost $129/mo per server plus $49/mo for PCI compliance management. So as a minimum, you’re in for $307/month just for hosting.
• SSL or TSL Certificate for https (security encrypted web transmission over https). Not a significant cost, but still count on $100 to $200.

This doesn’t include adminstrative time, the costs of getting sued if you have a breach, the cost of losing yoru merchant account and not being able to do business as the result of an unremediated fail in a PCI security scan and costs and so forth. For more on PCI compliance, see http://www.pcicomplianceguide.org/pcifaqs.php.

How to avoid these costs and risks?

First and foremost, don’t store credit cards on your server (or anywhere else) if you can possibly avoid it. Generally speaking, you can in fact avoid it through a variety of methods.

• Redirect your users to Paypal and have them sent back to your site after payment. This is the simplest and easiest way.
• Clone Pages. CRE Secure allows you to create a clone page on their server that looks like your web page, but is in fact on their server. They have an option, fairly pricey, that lets you have this page on your domain, but it is still served entirely off their server. They are responsible maintaining security in general and PCI compliance in particular on their servers and you have the much simpler job of achieving the simplest type of PCI Compliance. There are also hosted shopping carts like BigCommerce or Pinnacle Cart (hosted) that make PCI compliance easy with services similar to CRE Loaded, but easier to integrate because your shop is already on their server. I’m not a fan of hosted services except in the cases of the most trusted companies, but it’s definitely an option to consider.
• Tokenization. This is the slickest solution. You hire a third-party to manage your sensitive customer data. They are responsible for the difficult aspects of PCI Compliance and you only need to handle basic security. If you need to access the customer data, you use a customer ID and a “token” that represents their credit card, but which is not the credit card number itself. You only store the token, so even if your server is hacked, the system is not breached. You only have to make sure that you maintain a secure connection while the customer form gets sent to the third-party server. The two obvious solutions are Braintree and Authorize.net Customer Information Manager.

PCI Compliant Shopping Carts

Some advertise PCI Compliance and some don’t. Ubercart, for example, has worked hard on Ubercart’s PCI Compliance, but they don’t really advertise it. Others, like CRE Loaded and CS-Cart advertise their PCI compliance, but the shopping cart is just one piece of the puzzle. Most reputable carts these days will meet their part of the PCI-DSS standard, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg for making your site PCI compliant and no matter what cart you use, you’ll have a significant challenge if you want to store credit cards on your server.

Action Plan

So that’s still pretty dizzying. So here’s an action plan:

1. Decide between Paypal and other solutions. Start with TransFS calculator for a ballpark idea. If you go for Paypal, you’re basically done.
2. Get bids from TransFS or just comparison shop based on the Merchant Maverick recommendations. Always include Paypal, Intuit and some of the big ones in your search just to see how they stack up.
3. Figure out which ones integrate easily with your shopping cart. For example, though I like Braintree, I don’t know of any shopping cart that ships with Braintree integration.

I’m still working through a lot of options myself. If you have something to add, please add something to the comments. I’d love to hear what your experiences are.

I store everything in Roboform even though it costs money, because:

1. It’s convenient: one click and I’m logged in
2. It’s encrypted and password protected
3. All information is available from all compatible browsers and directly from the Roboform interface as well
4. It’s available offline

Offline support is important to me because I use it to store all kinds of information that I want encrypted, but which doesn’t necessarily pertain to online services. So I like that available even when I’m offline but, say, need my bank info to make a call to my bank.
Until now, Roboform for Chrome has only been available in the online version (which is similar to KeePass and other online password storage solutions). As of a couple of weeks ago, there is now an alpha version of the full Roboform toolbar.
Of course, it comes with all the warnings for alpha products, but I’ve been using it for a week or so and no serious problems. On one website, I used Roboform to fill a form and got a popup saying Roboform had become unresponsive, did I want to stop it? I clicked yes, but in fact nothing bad happened. It correctly filled and submitted the form and Roboform was still available on subsequent pages.
All in all, I’m pretty happy with this!

How many characters left?

What’s wrong?

1. It only gives me 255 characters. This is probably because they have chosen to store the text in a fixed-length database field for rapid retrieval. That’s what happens when the usability people and the marketing people get overrruled by some engineer who thinks that this minor efficiency improvement is sufficient reason to cripple the interface.
2. It doesn’t tell me anywhere how many characters I’m allowed. It wasn’t until I submitted my original version that it rejected it and came back and told me there was a 255 character limit.
3. It has no running count of characters used. This has become a standard feature everywhere else. We’re used to it on Twitter and most places that have low character limitations.

So what? Well, it took me three tries to get my feedback accepted. And by the time I did, the glowing testimonial I had for the merchant was gone. No room left.

All the merchant got out of this was my comment that I think they should make their free shipping offer appear more prominently on the page.

What the merchant did not get was my comment that when I factored in free shipping, their price was significantly better than the competitor’s price.

Okay, I just placed the order, so I can’t comment on speed of delivery and all that, but I would say that the shopping experience on US-Mattress.com was close to ideal. It’s easy to navigate, there are no real surprises (except why did they offer to let me upgrade to “standard front door” delivery for $49? What is the delivery I’m getting for free?).

Anyway, the bad part is that I agreed to do the Bizrate survey because I like to reward e-commerce merchants who do it “right”. I arrived at the survey with a good feeling, wanting to leave a great testimonial. But the frustrations of using Bizrate’s system left me feeling, well… frustrated. Of course, I don’t hold US-Mattress responsible, at least not consciously, but that’s the thing about usability problems — often they operate on a sub-conscious level. The good feeling I had upon completing the purchase is now forever associated with the stupid Bizrate survey.

And then, there’s Bizrate’s enticements to get you to take the survey, promising all sorts of free stuff. Obviously, everyone who spends a lot of time on the net knows by now that these are not “rewards”, but affiliate offers from which Bizrate makes additional income, but that’s a whole other story.

So here’s a quick rundown of seven things every scholar should know about copywriting.

Get Over It

First, though, I need to have a private word with you scholars. For pretty much all of my adult life, I’ve been a scholar and a researcher. Until I discovered Seth Godin, I thought “marketing” was a dirty word. It’s not. Whether you are trying to sell soap, yourself, your cause or your religion, knowing some basic marketing and copywriting principles will help you down the road. It all boils down to a simple question: would you rather have your ideas rejected or ignored because they are misunderstood as a result of poor presentation or rejected on their merits?

A good copywriter focuses on one thing: getting the reader to take the desired action, whether that’s buying a product, donating to the Sierra Club, voting for their candidate, joining their religion or signing up for their newsletter. There is both a pull and a push at work:

• Push: all the reasons that the reader would benefit from taking the desired action (look younger, save the planet, save your soul)
• Pull: moving all obstacles out of the way (money-back guarantee, simple and secure payment, free trial).

Good copywriting demonstrates benefits and removes obstacles. Applications for fellowships or grants need to meet those same goals, but most scholars are woefully bad at it. I’m not saying I’m particularly good, but here are a few things you might learn.

WIIFM — What’s in it for me?

Copywriters know that their prospect always has one question in mind: what’s in it for me? I was shocked to get a letter of recommendation that suggested that the course would be good for a student’s curriculum vitae. What vested interest do I have in padding someone’s resumé? More particularly, why would I want to pad that particular student’s resumé? What I want to hear is that the applicant can do the work and there is a very high probability that the student will actually take those skills and put them into practice. I think that’s fairly obvious for any similar course, especially one that offers a stipend to all participants as ours does.

Always stay focused on the benefit to the institution, grant agency or hiring committee. The benefit to the applicant is only relevant insofar as it also furthers the mission of the institution. In this case, the Meeter Center and I want to train researchers, so saying it will benefit the student by preparing her to conduct archival research is a benefit to both of us, but saying it will make the student look better or improve the student as a person is not relevant.

As an applicant, the key is to ask yourself “Why are these people taking applicants and offering money? What do they get out of it?” Before anything else, try to answer that question. You may not be able to answer it perfectly. You may see multiple reasons. You may see the wrong reasons, but at least you’ve figured out some reason. Anything in the application that does not specifically demonstrate that the course won’t be wasted on you, can be cut.

Features and benefits

This is the oldest saw in copywriting: focus on benefits, not features. Let’s say we’re talking about a car.

• Feature: rear-seat side impact airbags.
• Benefit: keep your children safe.

It is important to mention the feature, obviously. Not to do so would leave you with vague, vapid promises — “Keep the kiddies safe. Drive a SomeCar.” The more common error, though, is to list off features without saying why anyone should care. It’s essential to avoid that in grant and fellowship applications.

• Features:
  • Person: smart, well-read, engaging, excellent language skills, good writer, hard-working, drop-dead good looking and smells good too
  • Project: never been done before, studies the interaction of X and Y, examines the Blank Protocols.
• Benefits:
  • Person: will do valuable work, will put the money/class to good use, will make your institution look good
  • Project: will solve the long-standing question/problem of X, will allow future scholars to answer long-standing question, etc.

If you find yourself listing a “feature” and it doesn’t have a “benefit” to follow up on it, then either don’t list the feature, or figure out what the benefit is and make sure you highlight the benefit. Features only exist in copywriting to make your benefit claim credible. If you’re listing a feature that isn’t necessary to make the benefit claim credible, you’re wasting paper, ink and time.

Be Specific and Concrete

Every writing teacher, whether teaching copyrwriting or fiction, will say to be specific. How specific? This is where copywriters have an advantage. They can test two different ads, one that says “resulted in a 104% gain in efficiency” against “more than doubled efficiency” and see which one performs better. We can’t do that for grant and fellowship applications, but we know that in general, specificity beats generality and I’m surprised at how vague and general many applications are.

Let’s say you’re answering the question “Why do you want to take this course?” Consider three applicants. They each answer the question like this:

1. I’m hoping to do research for my dissertation on the price evolution of poker chips and that research will likely require use of manuscript sources.
2. My dissertation research on the price evolution of poker chips in Lyon from 1500-1800 will require me to read council registers and account books in the S series in the Archives départementales in Lyon
3. During my preliminary research for my project on the price evolution of poker chips, I came across many key documents the archives in Lyon that I was unable to read. In order to finish the project, I need better paleography skills.

Number one is actually already a lot better than many of the applications I got. I understand that from grad students who may not have refined their research area yet, but a faculty member sent in an application basically saying he was a nice guy who thought the course would be interesting. Not good enough. But even considering the pretty good choices above, who seems more likely to put the course to good use? Who is more likely to work really hard?

If you are one of those younger scholars who may not have carved out a research area yet, you can still mention work that you admire and plan to emulate.

Avoiding Doubt

The first example above also sows doubt (only “hoping”?). It’s not by accident I gave that as an example. One applicant, by all appearances an excellent candidate with an MA and some teaching experience to her credit, wrote: “I am wanting to pursue a doctorate degrees in hopes of studying….” Any writing teacher would see the problem there. The average copywriter would grab his chest and gasp for breath.

Sadly, there is no worse training for dynamic writing than academia. Academia is perhaps the only domain where there is no penalty for being boring, but there is a harsh penalty for being imprecise. Academic writing demands attenuation and hedges — “We believe that in some cases it appears possible for a limited number of quatloos to transform into looquats given the right conditions.” A sentence like that would hardly raise an eyebrow in academia, whereas you would get attacked from all sides if you said “Quatloos transform into looquats.”

Copywriters, however, are always thinking about how the reader will respond and what possible interpretations and emotional reactions the reader might have. “I’m wanting… in hopes of” and other hedges make a very serious applicant appear risky, uncertain and hesitant. Is this person really committed to learning what I’m teaching? Do we really want to give a stipend to someone who is “hoping” to use the course knowledge?

Be Honest

One thing that surprised me when I started reading marketers and copywriters is the value they place on honesty. The calculation is simple:

1. Every item returned costs enough to negate 5–10 sales. Making claims that you can’t back up will cost too much.
2. It’s usually cheaper to make a second sale to an existing satisfied customer than to go out and find a new customer,  and nothing creates dissatisfaction like being lied to.

Those two things being true, deceiving the customer ends up being costly for anyone except fly-by-night outfits that want to make a quick buck and get out. All that to say that you shouldn’t claim to have come across key documents in the archives if you haven’t actually been there. Credibility matters and a single manifest exaggeration raises questions about the credibility of everything else.

Most of our applicants say their French is “fluent”. I have to say, the question is very poorly worded on the application, so I don’t blame them for answering that way. That said, it does raise questions when someone says that his French is fluent and then lists four semesters of college French as the sum total of his French training. What else is exaggerated? Again, this makes accepting the applicant seem like a risk.

Risk Reversal

The classic example of risk reversal in marketing is the guarantee. I’m afraid of spending all that money on a new car and taking the risk that I’ll be stuck with a dud. So the manufacturer says “You’re right. That’s a lot of risk for you, an individual. Let me take on the risk. You buy that car, and I’ll take care of all repairs for the first 5 years or 60,000 miles, whichever comes first. Will you buy it now?”

Obviously, scholars can’t fully reverse a risk in that way — you can’t offer to pay back your fellowship if you haven’t successfully completed your dissertation within six years. But you can address risk. We had one first-year grad student some years ago who had a mixed letter of recommendation. The faculty member had good things to say about the applicant, but had some reservations about specific weaknesses. The professor was honest with us and with the student, though, so he was able to say “I know that professor X has doubts about my ability in this area. I will, however, commit to work extra hard in order to make up for that deficiency”.

We took him. The course was hard for him, as expected, but he seemed to get a fair bit out of it and is now an advanced PhD candidate studying under one of the top scholars in the field. The result is that the professor retained her credibility. Next time I see a letter from her, I’ll know it means exactly what it says (see “Be Honest” above). But she gave the student a fighting chance to state how he would compensate for weaknesses. Not exactly a classic risk reversal, but it gave us a lot more to go on than a vague application with all the usual platitudes. I’m fairly sure that some better-qualified people were rejected that year, but the combination of specificity, honesty and risk mitigation in the application got that candidate through the door, even though we tend to accept students with stronger language skills than that particular student.

What’s Your Story?

Seth Godin says in All Marketers Are Liars that he really wanted to call it All Marketers Are Storytellers, because he believes that effective marketing requires a compelling and authentic story. The story is a lie only in the sense that any story, whether about events that actually happened or a work of fiction, is a lie — all stories leave things out and tell the tale selectively. Not surprisingly, the second edition is called All Marketers Tell Stories… Why Authenticity Is the Best Marketing of All.

A grant application should also tell a story. That story is not your biography or a prose version of your resume. Notice that under “Be Specific”, example three is a story. There’s an arc to it. “Young student goes to Lyon, excited about research project on poker chips. Confronted with documents he can’t decipher, he looks for help and finds my course, just the thing he needs in his quest for arcane knowledge and scholarly bliss. If only there’s a spot for him.” A story need not be quite as personal as that, but you need a story that helps answer the question why you?

A Last Word

It’s not like getting into my class is a super rough competition. The financial award is only $500 for the two weeks and we accept over half the applicants, most of them in the summer after the second or third year of grad school (though we often admit one undergrad and one or two faculty members). Most of these students are soon going to be facing much stiffer competitions, like applying for Fulbright grants to do research in France, which this year had 25 slots for 197 applicants (12.7%). That’s a lot better than the 13 slots for 405 applicants for the UK (3.2%), but I would say it’s a fair bet that out of 200 PhD candidates, it’s fairly likely that 25 will have decent natural or acquired copywriting skills. If you’re not one of them, you’re not going to France on a Fulbright no matter how good you are. Simple as that.

The problem is, I have hated the interface design of every Apple product I’ve ever used. Among the most collossal mistakes — on the original Macs, you eject your floppy drive by dragging it to the Trash.

Switching from Audible to eMusic because of iTunes Player Interface Sins

Until recently, I was locked into using iTunes at least some of the time because it’s the only authorized way to burn books from Audible to CD (the unauthorized way is to play the book start to finish using a sound capture card and essentially re-record it as an MP3). Unfortunately, every time I have to use the iTunes player, I feel like screaming. It’s the main reason I just cancelled my Audible subscription. And frankly, the need to use the iTunes player in order to buy tunes off iTunes is the main reason I refuse to patronize iTunes. I just did a free trial of eMusic, and I’m sold. It frees me from the evil that is Apple (yes, I know, MS and Google are the evil empires oppressing poor little Apple. Thank God. I think Apple is the most rapacious of the three, they just haven’t been as successful at world domination yet, but I think we would all come to regret it if Apple had the power of a MS or Google. No friends, they would not use it repsonsibly, but that’s a long topic).

So where does the iTunes interface fail?

1. Managing Audio Books is Next to Impossible.

I have two choices. Let iTunes manage my files, or manage them myself. Since I have a lot of audiobooks, I can’t let iTunes or any other player pull data from the internet manage your tracks. For example, for Harry Potter, which runs to almost 100 discs, it files them under 5 authors. For a single book, it will be the tracks under multiple titles. And it will split tracks from the same disc.

In my opinion, the author should always be condsidered the “artist” for an audiobook, not the reader or some other random person. If I let iTunes handle this, I’ll get Harry Potter books filed, stupidly, under the artists:

1. J. K. Rowling (space)
2. J.K. Rowling (no space)
3. Jim Dale (the reader)
4. Nicholas Hooper (who wrote one of the soundtracks for the movie… uhh this is an audiobook, not a movie)
5. Patrick Doyle (ditto)

Then for album titles, I’ll get

1. Harry Potter and the Sorceror’s Stone disc 1
2. Harry Potter and the Sorceror’s Stone disc 01
3. Harry Potter & the Sorceror’s Stone disc 1
4. Harry Potter The Sorceror’s Stone disc 1
5. Harry Potter and the Sorceror’s Stone [motion picture soundtrack]

Now, I’m not just anal. This means that in order to put together a playlist for a single book that actually plays the tracks from the book in order (which is kind of important for most books), you would have to hunt through, in the worst case for the scenario I gave above, 25 folders. Okay, I have not encountered the worst case, but I have had a single books split willy-nilly among as many as five folders. So there’s no way you can let iTunes manage your files and still be able to listen to a book in sequence without considerable effort.

Fine, I’ll manage them myself. But the tools for managing files are incredibily rudimentary.

No file management and Import Settings are just format and quality settings

That's "advanced"???

If I burn tracks from a CD using iTunes, I have hardly any control over what goes where. I can select a main folder for my iTunes media and I can tell iTunes to manage the media or not. That’s it! In Winamp or Windows Media Player, I can say where I want imported files to go. They still mess up if I let them pull information from the internet, but at least I can burn to a “quarantined” area where I can look at the files from burn and make sure it didn’t spread them all over my media collection. With iTunes, I can’t do that.

Doesn’t Monitor my Media Folders

Seriously, I have to buy a $25 app just so that when I add files to my media folder, iTunes will see it by default? Otherwise, I have to “import” every time I add files. As I said, I don’t want to manage everything through iTunes. Of course, this wouldn’t be so bad, if not for the misguided playlist metaphor that dominates the interface.

Playlist Metaphor

And then, in iTunes, everything is done in a playlist metaphor. Yes, I can “Create playlist from selection”, but that means I have to find the files within iTunes, select them all (and for a book this could be 250 tracks if it’s 10 CDs with 25 tracks per CD), create a playlist and then play it. With Winamp, for example, I can just play a folder and I can also ask it to recurse down the directory tree and play everything in subfolders. In order. It takes me 7 seconds.

And then, and here’s what set me off this morning, if I want to burn a CD, I have to first create a playlist. Now, I only wanted to burn one track to a CD and normally I would never use iTunes to burn with, but this is an Audible book and Audible only works with iTunes (even the Audible Player won’t burn the book to disc). Now, let’s say I have a track downloaded to my desktop and I want to burn a CD in Windows Media Player. I simply open WMP, drag the file into the playlist area, and hit “Burn”. There’s no playlist saved, created or other annoyance.

I’m sure this is all well and good if my overriding objective is to use an iPod, but it isn’t.

Better Alternative – eMusic plus Winamp

So I have come up with better alternatives to managing media and getting my ID3 tags in my MP3s. That’s for a future post. But how can you get rid of dependence in the iTunes player? Well, there are only two services that really require me to use it: Audible and iTunes itself. So the key is to dump those services. These days, alternatives abound. For buying music and downloading audiobooks, you can go to Amazon or Wal-Mart or whereever.

If you want a subscription like Audible, though, I’ve switched to eMusic. Okay, full disclosure: I signed up for the eMusic free trial offer that came with my wife’s new laptop (but actually, if you just go to the site you get a similar offer without buying any laptop). The selection is somewhat limited in the free trial, but I still managed to find plenty of music and a book that I wanted. Even with a full subscription, you don’t have a catalog as extensive as Audible or iTunes, but it’s not bad and it’s cheaper than Audible ($10/month versus $15/month). For music, it’s subscription-based, so if you download more than ten tracks per month at iTunes, eMusic will be cheaper.

Most of all, though, the main thing that got me to switch is that eMusic files come as MP3s, so I can use any player I want to play, burn and otherwise enjoy my audio with any player I want, including easily putting it on a CD or my non-Apple MP3 player so I can enjoy my audiobooks in the car.

Good bye Audible. Good bye Apple. In the case of Audible, I’m sorry, because I like Audible and if they would let me manage my books easier, I would stick with them. In the case of iTunes… good riddance!

Now that I have that pointless rant out of my system (I’m understand that nobody really cares but me and that bashing Apple is an unfogiveable sin), as soon as I get a chance, I’m going to show you how I now just use filenames and create MP3 tags from filenames to manage everything, then I can control the sort order in any player… coming soon.

Houston... We have a problem

Every so often, I take a look at Google Maps to see whether they’ve finally put our house in the right spot. On the one hand, things are looking good. We’re only a quarter mile off now (as opposed to the 1.5 miles we’ve been off by until recently).

On the other hand, they’ve also added a bunch of landmarks to the map. Every single one of them is off by somewhere between a quarter mile and 25 miles. They even get the location of the famous Ahwahnee Dining Room wrong… by 17 miles. Though not on the image, they also put the Ahwahnee Hotel in the wrong place and show “National Park Services” in a spot that is, in reality, 15 miles from the nearest services (or buildings) of any kind, unless you count the roadside bathroom about half a mile from where they put marker. Keep in mind that this is a national park that got 3.9 million visitors last year, so screwing up the directions to basic services is not a minor problem.

Meanwhile, they succeed in successfully locating two well-known rock climbs, both of which likely have fewer than 100 visitors per year.

The only real bright side is that I can see is that they incorrectly label Carol’s house, so at least they’ve accidentally left her privacy intact.

I’m sure there are lots of reasons for this, but you can open the troubleshooting page by going to Settings -> Offline and scrolling down to the link for the Troubleshooting Page.

On my page, I noticed several errors for Failed to get blob down at the bottom of the page under “Recent Errors”.

A BLOB, of course, is a Binary Large Object. I realized at that point that I had unsynchronized messages with images attached (that is to say with BLOBs attached).

I tried moving these to Drafts, but that still didn’t work, so I copied and pasted the contents into a text editor for safe keeping, deleted the messages, cleared the browser cache, closed the browser, reopened, and reloaded GMail.

Success!

I’m sure there are a lot of other things that can cause this, but I didn’t find any good information on this on Google Groups or with a quick search, so hopefully this will help someone or at least give some directions to look in.

However, I think everyone should start an interview podcast. I’ve always loved listening to interviews on NPR (especially Fresh Air), but it always seemed like something that only a journalist with a radio show could do. Then I stumbled across Andrew Warner doing interviews over at Mixergy. Great interviews, in fact, with people like Derrick Sivers (founder of CD Baby), Tim Ferris (Four Hour Work Week), and some guy who got lost in the Amazon and had to dig deep to survive and get out. Great stuff and, with Andrew’s podcasting advice and encouragement, I decided to interview people I care about. He mostly interviews entrepeneurs. I interview skiers or, more precisely, people who make it their mission to help others ski better (instructors, coaches, trainers).

I’ve only done four interviews, but it’s been great: You learn stuff, you help people establish themselves as experts, the kind of people worth interviewing, you provide useful information or at least I hope so, and you make some fun connections or reconnections (it’s a good excuse to call up an old friend or someone you admire but otherwise would never call).

Those are the obvious benefits, but there are effects that I hadn’t expected. You start to hear how you speak. I do the interview, and then go back to edit. When I edit, I um learn, you know, the uh obvious — I and all my guests love filler words. But there’s more. I realize that I have a very non-linear way of speaking that takes away from my effectiveness as a speaker and makes me harder to follow. For example, I might say something like this: "When someone is doing deadlifts. Let’s say you have someone who wants to get strong for skiing and they’re looking for a good exercise and decide to try deadlifts…." And then of course, pepper it with ums and you knows.

So what? Lots of people speak that way, right? I feel like after only four interviews, it’s changing the way I speak very subtly. When you write anything of importance, you do a rough draft and at least one edit. The more you do that, the better your rough drafts become and the better your final drafts become. We don’t typically have any similar feedback loop for conversation. In fact, in my experience, we tend to avoid that feedback loop. I always hated listening to myself on recordings and I know many people feel the same way about themselves. And my friends, mercifully, do not critique my conversation. So again, there’s no feedback loop. Editing your interviews provides the feedback loop.

I’m not sure it will change the way I speak, but I think it will for two simple reasons. First, just knowing how I speak is huge. Second, when someone speaks directly, clearly and effectively, it takes a lot less work to edit. And since I prefer to avoid work, it’s an incentive to try to get better at my rough draft instead of trying to fix it in the editing stage. Of course you can’t always fix audio in the editing. And video? Forget it.

We’ll see where it ends, but if you are thinking there’s a topic you want to write about, consider doing interviews instead. So far, it’s been an interesting experiment for me and worth the time invested.

If you have an interview show, tell me about it in the comments or through the contact form and I’ll list you here with the anchor text of your choosing to give you a boost from the search engines.

Interview podcasts I listen to regularly include

• Mixergy — Andrew Warner interviews entrepeneurs and people of interest to entrepeneurs. Some great stuff.
• In the Trenches — Mike Robertson interviews top strength coaches. These are the top guys in the business, the ones that train elite athletes and the podcast is packed with good info, though also a fair bit of jargon. If you don’t know what RDLs are, it can be a bit hard to follow (RDL = Romanian Deadlift).

When I first heard about ChaCha I was amazed: I can text in a question and get an answer in two minutes. I was amazed because sometimes in the course of my research, I have questions that take days to answer or that I can’t answer at all. Imagine getting that down to two minutes. Then I thought maybe they don’t have God-like omniscience and maybe, just maybe, they aren’t set up to do archival research on sixteenth-century Geneva. Maybe you need to focus on simpler questions, more modern questions.

At Pubcon, someone mentioned that you can use the AdWords search preview tool if you want to see where you rank for a given search term without interference from personalized search (if logged into a Google account) or geo-targetting (always on based on your IP number which is sent to Google with every request). This cool tool also lets you see what search results (and ads) you would get in various geographical regions.

So I thought I would do a somewhat whimsical search and searched on bowling deaths. The choice isn’t arbitrary. I usually rank #1 for that search, but I was curious to find out whether that was true even if Google didn’t know who or where I was. And sure enough, there I was, still #1. But ChaCha came up as the number two result with a clear and succinct answer that looked suspiciously familiar. To the question "How many deaths are caused annually by bowling," the ChaCha expert answered

On average there are four bowling deaths due to bowling or bowling equipment each year. Natural deaths while bowling do not count.

Sure enough, the "source" cited was none other than my article. The problem is, my article is satire. The point of the article, to the extent that there was one, was to highlight the idiotic ways in which journalists use statistics, often failing to understand the importance of sample size, significance (as determined by chi-square and such) and so forth.

That article gets a lot of mentions in forums, almost always with a "heh heh" after it. ChaCha is unique in treating it as fact. So I guess that’s the downside of getting answers in two minutes. Maybe I just guessed right in my satirical article? Nah. ChaCha cites its sources, in this case, it’s my very own analysis death rates from bowling.

I wonder how many other examples one could find. Are you a ChaCha user? Have you gotten any tragically bad ChaCha answers? If so, add a comment and tell us about it. I sure hope you weren’t asking for directions!

I’ve already written about how I use Twitter and why I follow so few people. I’ve also thought about the possible ways to use Twitter. Greg’s situation got me thinking specifics of how to use Twitter as a writer. My books, being obscure scholarly tomes, I haven’t used Twitter to promote them, but I’ve been watching how people use Twitter and what works and what doesn’t and this is my best advice to Greg. If you have something to add, disagree with something, or think this is good advice and want to encourage Greg to follow this advice, please help Greg out by leaving a comment.

If you don’t need a pep talk about self-promotion, you can skip straight to the bit on how writers can use Twitter, but first I feel compelled to address something that might be the biggest obstacle for many writers…

Self-Promotion Makes You Feel Icky? Get Over It!

Best-selling author Tim Ferris gives a great interview on Mixergy.com that provides illuminating insight the new world of book publishing and promotion. Every author should listen to this. If you’re too much of an artiste to get out there and hawk your book, be prepared to see your book remaindered. Comfort with self-promotion is a major hurdle for many authors, especially those of us trained to life of scholarship and poverty. So before we even get into the specifics of Twitter, first ask yourself:

• Do you think your book is worthwhile and well-written?
• Do you think that there are people out there who would derive pleasure or useful information from your book?
• Do you think there’s something slimy about making it as easy as possible for people to learn about and purchase a useful and/or enjoyable book?
• You’re diligent enough to write a book, are you too lazy to do some work to spread the word about it?

If you answered yes to any of those questions, may you write the book of the century, so brilliant that word will spread all on its own with no help from you. Otherwise, may the Force be with you. I would say "no skin off my back," but if you have a book that I would enjoy reading, it is skin off my back. That’s the realization that changed my attitudes on the subject (though not always my practice). If you have something that could improve someone’s life, even "just" by being entertaining, and you do nothing to get the word out there, you are doing a disservice to all the people who could benefit and you are dishonoring your own labor.

That’s probably preaching to the choir. Most people probably agree with that already or need a lot more convincing than that. But in any case, ask yourself very honestly if self-promotion still makes you feel icky. I’ll be honest, it does me, but thinking about it like I just outlined, makes me a lot more comfortable with it.

Ideas on How to Use Twitter as an Author

Okay, so you’re convinced that you owe it to your soon-to-be adoring public to get the word out about your masterpiece. You’ll want to create a Facebook Fan Page. And you’ll want to build a presence and above all a following on Twitter.

Your goal is to connect with people who share your interests and might enjoy your book in order to create an audience who will be ready to buy when the book comes out. It’s not how many copies you sell in a year that affects your Amazon (or god willing NYT) ranking, it’s how many you’ve sold recently. So one of the keys is preparing the soil. You have all these people following you because you post on stuff they care about. They like you for it and they’re grateful, which is as it should be, because it takes actual effort on your part. Your book comes out. Your Twitter followers buy 500 copies. It’s not many, but it’s all in the same week. That makes you the #1 history book on Amazon and pushes you to the top to get noticed. Small numbers are big here.

• Remember: You’re reaching out to new people, not keeping up with your old surfing buddies. That has a big impact on what you’ll post and it’s good to be clear on your goals. I have two accounts. On my "just for friends" account, for the most part, if we’ve never had a face-to-face conversation, I’m not following you on that account and I’m posting stuff that only people who know me would find interesting (and often not even them). I’ve been playing with Twitter to help attract readers to one of my websites. For that, I tweet on personal topics, but not inside jokes for my friends, and I keep most of the posts on subjects in line with the website.
• Create a custom profile background. Your background should say something about who you are. Once you have a cover design, you need a photo of the book on your profile page.
• Link to your book’s website from your profile. You have at least a basic website for your book right? No? Why not? You can build a simple website in an hour.
• This is a marathon, not a sprint. You’re a writer, so you know all about persistence and marathons. If you have a year until your book goes to press, that’s great. You’ll need all of that because it’s important to start building that audience now.
• Content first, then networking. You can start following your real-world friends right away, but don’t follow people you don’t know until you have some posting history. I always look to see what sort of posts someone has before I follow back. If it’s just 2-3 vague posts, I don’t follow back.
• Write tweets on topics related to your book. When I say "related to your book" that doesn’t mean only self-absorbed posts about how the writing is going, but also just topically related. If you’re writing about pilots flying over the Himalaya in World War II, then you could have posts on WWII history, aviation, the Himalaya. Link to books or book reviews on something you’ve read lately that you liked. Share something cool you’ve found in your research. And yes, the occasional self-absorbed post about how the writing is going. Tweet enough about topics loosely related to your book that there is always one on your profile page.
• Don’t sell on Twitter. Your goal is to connect, have a presence and on rare occasions mention that you have a book for sale. Rare occasions. In other words, as often as you would want to get a sales pitch from every person in your stream, that’s how often they want a sales pitch from you. Save it for when you need.
• Sell on Twitter. Okay, sometimes you do need it. When your book comes out and you want to generate momentum to get higher listings in Amazon or, God willing, the New York Times. That’s when you call on the people who follow you and say, very simply, "If you’re thinking of buying my book eventually, it would be huge for me if you ordered it this week." That’s 101 characters, so there’s even enough left over for a link to where to buy it. Remember though, this it a rare event, calling in a favor from your followers in return for all the great links and thoughts you offer without asking anything in return.
• Regular updates are good, but more than a couple a day and people get tired of you. There are only two sorts of people who will put up with a regular output of 20 posts per day — people who are filtering and not actually reading you anyway, and people who are stalking you and you shouldn’t be giving them that much information. Everyone else is just getting annoyed and they will unfollow you. One marketer type I was reading said there is an optimum number of tweets per day, and that number is three. I think he meant it half tongue-in-cheek, but that correlates with my experience in terms of who I most like to follow. Also, it’s not about averages. The worst twitterers of all do no posts for a month, then do thirty in two days. Never forget that it takes only one click to unfollow you.
• No minute-by-minute updates. If coffee doesn’t play a big role in your book, nobody cares what kind of coffee you had this morning. I hate to break the bad news, but aside from your mother and a few friends, nobody cares about you. They will follow you because you have something interesting to say for them.
• Be personal, be real. The flip side of the last point is that you want to be a real person, the idea is to connect with people on a somewhat more personal level, so your Twitter stream needs some personal flavor, some updates that are not "on topic". It’s a balance, between letting people know who you are and burying them in an avalanche of personal detail. Write a fair number of posts that are specific to you (either personally or your book). If your best friend or spouse can’t guess from the content on the first page whose Twitter stream it is, you’re being way too vague and general.
• Follow the people who follow you if they don’t look like robots or spammers. If someone looks really off from my interests, I don’t follow, but generally you want to because this allows you to direct message each other which can really help get to know someone. If you’re writing non-fiction and still researching, you probably want to make it easy for people to communicate with you.
• Actively block spammers and robots. Some people disagree with this. What’s the harm in having someone you don’t like follow you and add to your follower count? The way I see it, when you follow someone, before they follow back, they’ll look at what you post, who’s following you and who you follow. You want that profile to look like "their people" (i.e. actual human beings who read books like yours). Put another way, think about how Google evaluates web pages. It’s who links to you and who you link to that helps them decide which "neighborhood" you’re in. I want my Twitter profile to show that I’m in a neighborhood of "our people". In the Twitter world, I live in a gated community. Spammer scumbags are turned away by security.
• Find people to follow with Twitter search. With some Twitter readers (Hoot Suite, Tweetdeck, Seesmic, etc.), you can create a column for a search if you really want to follow your topic. Put in some words related to your book and find people to follow and connect with. If you follow someone, he or she will likely look at your profile. If they see a kindred spirit, they’ll follow you.
• If someone mentions you, they’ll do so with an "at reply" and you must acknowledge it. To fail to do so makes you look like a prima dona too busy to respond to the little people. If you are like Neil Gaiman with thousands of followers, all reasonable people will understand that you can’t respond to everyone (though Neil gets complaints from people who just don’t get it). For most of us, though, it is completely manageable in a few minutes per day. If you don’t have those few minutes, then just don’t be on Twitter. Simple as that. Of be on Twitter, but just for social reasons, not to spread the word about your book.

I know there are many things I’ve left out and maybe some things that you disagree with. If so, please leave a comment to make this post better for other writers!

In times of yore, like last month, having a long username was a liability for getting "retweeted" because your Twitter nickname counted toward the character count in the retweet (which sounds like something Elmer Fudd would say to the troops do if being overrun by superior forces: Retweet! Retweet!). Twitter has recently added new functionality that makes the length of the username irrelevant, but I’m somewhat sorry they did. I think that this is a case where the cure is worse than the disease.

Under the new system, if I retweet something, it appears to my followers as if they’re suddently following that person. In my profile picture appearing in their stream, but the person I retweeted appearing out of nowhere in their stream. This is in theory good for the the person who wrote the original post, but not necessarily.

• From the end reader perspective. I find this confusing. Suddenly people I don’t know are appearing in my stream. Maybe I’m just not used to it, but I don’t particularly like that. On the plus side, I have instant one-click access to the original author’s information.
• From the retweeter’s perspective. I lose my identity. I may want to share something, but I may want my followers to know that it’s from me. On the plus side, I don’t have to edit a post down to fit into the 140-char limit.
• From the original author’s perspective. You might think there’s no downside here. Suddenly, there you are with your picture and everything in the stream of everyone who follows your beloved retweeter. The downside here is that you’ve mostly lost the benefits of social proof and the value of a retweet as a personal recommendation.

The last point bears some further comment. Let’s say I’m an author hoping to reach potential readers of my forthcoming book via Twitter (see Twitter for writers). I’m now injected picture and all into the user’s stream, which has to be better, right?

The problem is that the challenge is not in being available to the largest number of people, but in actually finding a way to cut through the noise. I delete at least half of my non-spam emails unopened and read at best 20% of what appears in my Twitter stream. And I follow very few people. I think the numbers are worse with someone who follows 200 or 2000 people. I tend to skim for the people I really want to read. More and more, Twitter applications let me filter into user lists, topic lists, and all sorts of things. So though I will always read something if it has @simplytheresa’s smiling face, on most days, I skip most people in my stream unless I’m in a serious procrastination mode. And to be clear, I’m not skipping people I actively dislike, because obviously I’m not following those people. I’m skipping anyone that I don’t really really really want to read, some days anyone who isn’t my wife. In other words, when
I’m skimming, it’s a whitelist algorithm, not a blacklist. I’m looking for people I actively want to read. If I’m not looking for you, you don’t get read. So if you someone retweets you with the native Twitter function, that means you. I don’t know you and I won’t read you.

It’s not clear what’s going to happen with the native Twitter. Most people use some third-party application to tweet from and that functionality is not included in most of them yet, though I suspect it will be soon. And then the next question is whether or not it will be widely adopted. I suspect it will.

So that leads to the important question: how can you get people to retweet old-style? In short, there’s not much you can do to positively encourage it. The best you can do is remove obstacles. Above all, that means making sure that your message stands on it’s own and doesn’t need editing to be retweeted.

Again, consider an author who wants to get the word out about his book, in part using Twitter. So if you’re giving a book reading, for example, that you announce on Twitter, you want your fans to be able to pass that on to their friends, which they will usually do with a "retweet". The old and still standard format is to take your message and copy it into their message and add "RT @yourname[space]".

Thankfully for Robert Louis Stevenson, he wasn’t trying to sell books in the Twitter era. By the time he leaves enough space for retweeting, he’s used up 25 characters, 18% of his total allotement. So he can’t tweet this 140 character message

I’m giving 2 Bay Area readings from Kidnapped this month – Dec 12 @ 7pm @ Book Passages in Corte Madera, Dec 14 @ 8:30pm @ Moe’s in Berkeley

Because it would become

RT @RobertLouisStevenson I’m giving 2 Bay Area readings from Kidnapped this month – Dec 12 @ 7pm @ Book Passages in Corte Madera, Dec 14 @ 8

Homer, on the other hand, would have it made.

RT @Homer I’m giving 2 Bay Area readings from Iliad this month – Dec 12, 7pm @ Book Passages, Corte Madera; Dec 14, 8pm at Moe’s in Berkeley

If at all possible, Robert Louis Stevenson would have wanted to get on Twitter day one to reserve RLS or at least RLStevenson. Regardless of the name, when composing a tweet that he wants retweeted, RLS would want to know his retweetable character count. The easy way to do this is to simply compose the post as a retweet, and then lop of the RT @RobertLouisStevenson part. Beyond that, people will do what they do and it remains to be seen whether the new interface features will overcome established practice. As I say, I suspect they will, and you’ll just have to live with it.

What do you think of the new Twitter Retweet function? Add a comment with your thumbs up or thumbs down.

Fool’s Goal and the Value of Forests

Obviously, I’m not against long-term goal setting per se. As I mentioned, my weekly task list depends on having some longer term goals in order to decide what goes on the list. That said, if you set a long-term goal whose only value is in realizing the goal, it’s the wrong goal. As a historian, I’m in favor of long-term thinking. The problem is that when you chart a course into the future, you exclude the one-in-a-million probabilities, but over long enough spans of time, some of these come to pass, so there is too much uncertainty in long-term plans for them to have any degree of accountability.

It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t make them, but the value in long-term planning is usually in the unintended consequences that result from the fact that projecting far into the future allows us to understand more clearly what’s happening in the present. I strongly recommend the best book I know on long-term thinking, The Clock of the Long Now, by Stewart Brand. Brand cites the example of the Swedish Navy who, in the eighteenth century, noticed that it was becoming harder and harder to find tall straight trees to make masts for ships. Since having fast, powerful ships was an essential strategic resource, the navy commissioned the royal forester to set aside areas to grow these trees. Two hundred years later, the forester notified the navy that their trees were ready. The trees no longer had any great strategic value, but they did have tremendous value as some of the last remaining old-growth forest in Sweden. The goal of securing an essential strategic resource had been rendered null by new technology, but long-term planning had enabled the navy to recognize the problem of the disappearing forests.

It’s the same with the majority of goals we set. If we decide to train for a marathon, it’s not really finishing the marathon that matters for most of us. Most of the benefit is in the training for it.

Having some long-term goals helps prioritize tasks, but I mostly focus on short-term tasks, for reasons I explain below. These, by the way can be anything, even something like “get to bed before 10pm five nights this week” or “go skiing”. They always include some fun things, usually including at least four exercise days. This article is one item on this week’s list and so was this morning’s run. The key is that they are things I not only want to do (write, run) or have to do (paint the house), but things I will do that week, not things I sort of vaguely might to do that week if I get to it.

Failing Has to Feel Like This

If I fail, I “fine” myself $250. If I finish it, I award myself $50. The 5:1 ratio there is not accidental. Humans tend to be more attuned to voiding pain than to seeking pleasure. Losing five weeks of reward for a single failure is really powerful. The reward money goes into a pot to spend on things I otherwise wouldn’t spring for. Wireless headphones for example, which I most definitely don’t need, but not things like shoes or pants. Having a defined list, a defined deadline and $300 riding on it helps me stay on track. It’s been an interesting experiment (going on about three months now). Depending on how miserly you are, maybe $300 won’t do it for you. Maybe you need to make it $3000. Maybe $30. One thing is certain: for the system to work, it needs to be an amount of money that will hurt and the loss has to be bigger than the gain. We humans are wired that way. It also helps to have it allocated toward something you really want, so you tell yourself you’ll get that plane ticket or iPod Touch when, and only when you’ve saved up by ticking your list every week. So if you go five weeks and you’re almost there, missing one goal that week sets your iPod purchase back six weeks! Then you have a dilemma — stay up until midnight writing that article or wait an extra six weeks to buy your bauble. It’s powerful.

So what have I noticed as a result of my experiment?

Short-term tasks allow for accountability.

It’s hard to be accountable on a daily or weekly basis for progress toward long-term goals. Something that will take a year to achieve or perhaps that I may never really achieve is just too abstract. That abstraction makes those type of goals very easy to avoid, shirk and procrastinate on. Because I choose actions I can control and that are achievable, I can hold myself accountable every week. Focusing on a weekly list of discreet tasks that I must finish has four consequences:

1. My weekly tasks are not all that ambitious. I set targets I can meet. This helps me be realistic and really prioritize.
2. My weekly tasks are things I can control. So I would never say “Talk to Bill about X.” I would say “Make at least three attempts to reach Bill to discuss X”.
3. I have more true free time because when my list is done for the week, I’m done and can pitter and putter guilt free.
4. I rack up victories, not defeats, successes, not failures.

The last of these may be the most important. At any given moment, I have 200 years worth of things I would like to do in theory, but the list grows faster than I can knock things off. Life is just too damn interesting! The downside of there being so many interesting things to do in life is that they pile up and that can lead to feeling that I just get further and further behind on those long-term goals and that’s depressing. Actually knocking of a list from start to finish every week can really change how you feel about the freedom and control you have in life.

Small steps are easier to take than giant steps.

As a mountaineer I have never found summits very motivating. I need to focus on the experience and on very small, intermediate milestones if I’m to get anywhere. On a long, steep snow slope, I often play the 50-step game, that is telling myself I will take 50 steps before I rest. Then I play the ten breaths game, that is, I’ll only rest for ten breaths, then start plodding again. The summit is too abstract. I focus on the immediate task and the experience and find that much better at keeping me going.

I once read something in Hindu literature which, sadly, I can’t find again, that said roughly: “If we dare too much, we will be destroyed, but by advancing in small steps, the gods themselves can be defeated.”

Any process you don’t break down into manageable components becomes overwhelming. Breaking it down into small unintimidating chunks makes everything more pleasant and manageable. Having these very discreet and achievable lists is like that. It’s a lot less intimidating to get going on something I can finishthis week.

It’s ultimately not the goal that matters

Mark Twight, one of America’s great alpinists, notes that it’s possible to “fail upwards”, that is climb yourself into a situation unintentionally where your only recourse is to continue up, possibly in bad style and often at increasing risk. He sees that as a failure because you reach the summit not because you choose to, but because you have to. Conversely, it’s also possible to have a great climb that ends in retreat, but retreat on your own terms, which can be a success (you have a great time, you learn a lot, you live). Ultimately, the value lies in the climb, not in the summit.

Or, you had an idea for this brilliant new service and you would have run home and started coding, but first you need to learn seven new technologies and, well, there are dogs to feed and you still haven’t learned how to integrate Ruby on Rails with SMS messaging, so you’ve been working away for three years, hundreds of hours, but you haven’t launched anything, so you don’t actually have a clue whether or not anyone actually wants your service. Have you been wasting your time and how will you know?

The best way to find out, is to get a simple content site up and start collecting data to find out whether there’s any interest at all. Launch simple and then, depending on what rolls in for data, build it out. At least, you’ll have some content that can site on the web and age.

Still stuck? I just gave a talk at Pubcon on the simplest, fastest method to get something online, because something, is better than nothing.

The idea was to inspire people to simplify the process and make it as easy as possible to get started, get some content up and start collecting data to find out if anyone but you actually gives a damn about your genius idea before you spend thousands of hours and thousands of dollars thinking about it.

You can download the Powerpoint Deck here:
Super Rapid Website Developement

I hope you enjoy it – if you have any questions, drop me a line.

So I’ve been struggling lately trying to get things sorted out for doing remote video interviews. The person who inspired me, more than any, to start doing these interviews is Andrew Warner. Over at Mixergy.com, he does terrific interviews with people who are crafting lives of their own design, mostly entrepeneurs. If that sounds interesting, head over there and poke around. If it doesn’t sound interesting, start with the interviews of Derek Sivers, Premal Shah and Yossi Ginsburg. If you don’t find those interesting and inspiring, I don’t know what to say.

Anyway, Andrew not only has interesting guests, but he really has the interview thing down and so, struggling with my own efforts, I asked him if he would consent to a phone call to help me out. Despite being in between his honeymoon and his impending move to Argentina, he found time to talk to me and here are some tips he passed on.

• Suggest a time in your initial email. This seems so obvious, but I’ve been wasting a lot of time getting consent and then going round about scheduling and waiting for replies. This way they can either say yes, no or suggest another time and that shortcuts the whole process.
• Transcripts. Andrew has transcripts of his interviews on his site and I asked him how he produces them. He said he uses Mechanical Turk and offers people $2 per 5 minute segment they transcribe. He said he thinks a good summary would actually be as good or better than a transcipt. That was my gut feeling, which is good news for me. Having paid my bills for 20 years by putting words on a page, I find the prospect of writing a summary of an interview a lot less daunting than chopping it into segments and getting it transcribed. Anyway, I don’t feel like I’ve really digested a conversation until I retell to someone else or I write about it (thus the current summary).
• I’m interested in interviewing skiers, ski instructors, ski mountaineering guides and folks like that. Not surprisingly, they’re not as techy as the web entrepeneurs that Andrew interviews, but I was stuck on the idea of Skype-to-Skype interviews or phone-to-phone interviews. He suggested just doing the interview over the phone via Skype, have audio only. Another solution that seemed so simple and obvious once Andrew said it.
• For audio-only interviews, show a picture with a play button so it sort of looks like video and gives people something to look at. This was huge because I was tearing my hair out about the video aspect and I couldn’t figure out how to get my telephone to record. I hadn’t thought I could just call someone on their home telephone using Skype and just record it. And I get unlimited long distance for $3 per month!
• Get a decent microphone. Andrew has tried mics up to $500. He recommended the Blue Snowball USB Mic, which I found at Amazon for just $69 ($139 list). It came two days later and the difference is huge — almost all the hum, hiss, buzz and other distortion dropped away. This is a huge improvement. $69 well spent. [update: the Blue Snowball came and I've recorded two calls with it. It's everything Andrew promised. HUGE jump in sound quality]

• Get a backup. Another tip that’s so obvious when someone says it. I had been experimenting with Pamela for Skype, which lets you record audio and video calls, but was having trouble with it quitting [update: this was a known issue and is now fixed], so I was afraid to depend on it. Andrew runs his call recorder (I believe Ecamm Call Recorder, which is Mac only), plus he runs a screen capture program (Screenflow, again Mac Only), so he is actually recording twice and if the primary recorder fails, he is automatically doing a backup. As obvious as it is brilliant once you someone tells you. I haven’t settled on a screen capture program, but there are some good free ones for Windows:
  • NCH Software has a whole host of free tools (with upgrades to pro versions, but generally the free ones do what I need at this point). For screen capture, I’m using Debut Video Recorder. The also have good audio and video file format converters, audio editing software (similar to Audacity).
  • Camstudio is a Camtasia competitor. Camtasia is the category leader and costs several hundred dollars. Camstudio does everything I could want.
• Webcams have lower quality than a real video camera, but allow you to see yourself. This is a good tip. I never realized how much I move around, look around close my eyes when I’m thinking, uhhhh rub my nose and eyes and lick my lips. I am not a TV presence and definitely won’t be the next Gary Vaynerchuk (another reason for me to like audio, even though I have a voice for print).

Maybe to people smarter than me, all of this seems obvious, but this advice cut through so many podcasting obstacles for me. It’s absolutely huge. Thanks Andrew!

I just loved the service on keyword airlines!

Source: Skymall catalog on a recent Delta flight.

I’m sure this testimonial is 100% legitimate. I mean, your typical loving family peppers their speech with “keyword” when they can’t think of the exact word, right? And a company would never reuse a testimonial would they? Of course not!

I was really bored, so I picked up the in-flight gadget catalog and they had this ad for the coolest keyword ever! The family in the testimonial for the keyword made it sound so good, I just had to have one!

The Audience Problem

Like I say, not sure how much my thoughts are worth, since clearly they’re aiming at another audience. As in: I don’t do chat, IM, text messaging or any of that. I have long since trained my friends that I don’t often answer emails the same day I receive them (and long before I heard of Tim Ferris). The only immediate response thing I do is phone and skype and I only give my skype address out to family and a few friends and try to limit that. So it’s a bit hard for me to see how I would participate in Aardvark.

Conceptual level. The Big Idea level….

Here’s where they fail to make the sale to me and once they fail to make this sale, it’s an uphill battle for them to build trust through the rest of the process. The thing that is difficult for me to get around is that in my view there are personal and impersonal channels of communication.

• Personal: email, chat, skype, Facebook personal messaging, Twitter direct messagings. These are all messages from someone to me specifically and nobody else.
• Impersonal: Twitter posts, forums, Facebook wall, etc. These are messages that go from someone to the wide wide world. They’re not to me personally and uniquely.

I try to keep my personal channels free from impersonal messages. I have spamcatcher email addresses I use for things that blur the line, such as newsletters, mailing lists, signing up for accounts with BestBuy, Amazon and such. It strikes me that Aardvark is trying to use a personal channel (chat, email) to deliver an impersonal message. Yes, it is personalized — I only get messages that are supposed to be appropriate to me — but not personal, that is only to me. So that’s an adoption hurdle for me just as a concept.

The Registration Problem

They could overcome the personal/impersonal problem by using the registration process to allay fears and make the sale, but in my opinion, they do the opposite. Aardvark actually asks for quite a bit of information just to get started. I’m always skeptical of that and if I’m going to give away a lot of personal information about where I live and what I like, information that marketers will kill for (or worse yet, pay for). To give away all that information, it needs to meet one of two conditions, and preferably both:

• I need it. I may be a little uneasy about a site, but they have something that I absolutely need. I can’t do without it or I don’t want to do without it. They’re asking for personal details, but they’re offering something of great value.
• I trust them. There are a few sites that I trust implicitly with my information. I don’t give Amazon more than I have to, and they have only my spam catcher email address, but over the years they’ve built up great trust by not abusing my information. Often not-for-profits ask me to trust them because they have a great mission and are inherently good. Just like the government, if you catch my meaning. And if you don’t, that is to say that the government has been a poor steward of my privacy lately.

Typically, when I sign up for a new service that I don’t necessarily trust, I start by giving a spam catcher address and often a fake name (and almost always a fake birth date). If they want personally identifiable information,they need to build my trust either before, during or after the registration process.

I actually went all the way through the Aardvark registration process because I was asked by a friend to test it. I found it much too intrusive for a site that I had never heard of and knew little about. They have detailed information on how it works in theory, but nothing at all on what happens with my data, who can see it, and what control I would have over contact from people I know and don’t know.

An example

And then there are parts that I didn’t do anyway, even if invited by my friend…. Example: in general, I block all Facebook apps. I find all those snowballs fights, mafia, pirate stuff absurd and just a distraction to keeping in touch with family and friends. And I don’t collect Facebook friends. I try to keep it a personal channel as much as possible. If you we don’t have personal history together, you’re not on my Facebook list. When Aardvark offers to connect to Facebook, it’s still not clear to me exactly what’s going to happen, how it’s going to show up on Facebook, what my friends will see, and what exactly my benefit is. Ideally, exactly next to the Facebook connect button there should be a "what’s this?" or "how this works" link to a video that shows how it shows up in Facebook, what my friends will see, what benefits it offers and what hassles, if any, it imposes on my life. For me Facebook is a semi-personal channel and and I don’t want to annoy my friends and family that I keep in touch with via Facebook. Before I connect other data, I need to know that it won’t annoy my friends or affect my reputation.

A Broken Interface Erodes Trust

If I start setup, I can’t get to the welcome/home page any more or at least I couldn’t figure out how. It always brings me to the last spot I was in during setup like a pitbull that won’t let go. Clicking on the Aardvark at the top should always take me to the home page (a web interface standard that must not be broken), but it took me to the Facebook Connect page. So I’m not on Facebook (though I am) and it took me to the Add Categories page. But do I want to add categories? Again, are my categories and demographic info being shared with marketers? This type of behavior once again erodes trust. It makes the user feel trapped.

A recommendation

Think about every possible hesitation and catch me exactly at my hesitation point, like the suggestion to have an explanation about effects on privacy and such right next to the Facebook Connect button. I know of marketers who say they get much higher conversions when they have a popup link to their privacy policy right on the registration or order form, for example. That would help a lot.

Aardvark needs to think a bit more about the registration process if they want easy adoption beyond social networking true believers: what trust and social proof barriers might people perceive, figure out what the choke points are by keeping track of exactly where people abandon the process, figure out why, and take steps to fix it.

Online, trust is everything. In person, we have the idea that if something goes truly bad, we can go down to the business or local animal shelter or whatever and picket, protest, call the police, walk in with a lawyer. It doesn’t mean I trust those businesses. They often ask for a phone number at transaction time and I simply say no. But I do have the assurance that I can come down and find these people.

Trust is harder to build online and must be cultivated carefully and persistently at every possible occasion. There is no such thing as paying to much attention to building trust, and Aardvark needs to pay more attention.

Back in the 1980s, I hitchhiked thousands of miles to find work, go rock climbing and visit relatives. After working the fish processing plants in Alaska, dressed in worn military surplus clothing, toting a large backpack and sporting a beard, I was not optimally groomed for hitchhiking success. I spent over eight hours by the side of the road waiting for a ride on many occasions and got picked up by a variety of somewhat unstable characters, including a nice old grandfatherly man who at one point was waving a gun about complaining about all the Californians invading Oregon. I never had a really bad ride, though and was only conditionally threatened with death ("If you fuck with me, I’ll kill you"). That seemed fair (I wasn’t planning to fuck with him) and he turned out to be quite a nice guy for someone only six months out of prison.

Over time I figured out some rules for successful hitching that turn out to be some pretty good rules for life, though I think I might need to remind myself of the lesson a bit more forcefully.

1. The slowest, most dangerous way to hitchhike is to stand by the side of the road with your thumb out hoping someone takes pity on you and stops to help.
2. The fastest, safest, most effective way to hitchhike is to go to places where travellers are already stopped, and pitch your case.
3. Looking dangerous puts you in danger.

If it’s not obvious why this is so and how it applies elsewhere, let me just ask this:

• Is buying from your online store as difficult as stopping a speeding car on a road without an adequate pullout for a total stranger who looks dangerous?
• Did you get your last job by waiting around for someone to post a position that matched your qualifications?

Some Commentary for Slow Learners

Let me explain a little more about how this works. Rather than standing by the side of the road, find a place like a gas station right off the highway. Approach someone and say "Excuse me, sorry to bother you. I’m trying to get to SomeCity. I’d be happy to help with the gas [unless you're really, really broke] if you’d be willing to let me ride along."

• Take control of the decision. If you stand by the side of the road with your thumb out, you have turned over the choice of whom you’ll ride with to random psychopaths passing in cars. Don’t let the psychopaths decide. Ask for help, rather than waiting for someone to offer. Donate to a political campaign early, before the big money psychopaths have chosen someone who meets their needs. Aside from his first job out of college, my brother has convinced every company he’s worked for to create the position they hired him into. I pretty much liquated everything and took on debt because the most important thing to me was to become a historian. Within two years I was eeking out a living and getting paid to do exactly the sort of research I wanted, despite only taking one history course in college. Lately, though, I’m disappointed in myself. I feel like I’ve been doing too much standing by the side of the road and not enough going to parking lots. I signed up to give a talk way outside my field in November. We’ll see how that goes.
• Make it easy for people to help you. I see a lot of people hitching where traffic is moving fast, there’s no decent pullout and I don’t get a long look at them. If they’re already stopped, you’ve taken away one impediment to letting you onboard. How hard is it to keep my foot on the gas compared to stopping? How hard is it to go back to Google for another search instead of trying to navigate your impossible website?
• Make a connection.You might think, "They can’t know I’m not a psychopath just by one sentence at a gas station." That’s true, but they can sense normalcy, they can see you up close, they can tell you’re not stinking drunk. Or just plain stinking. That’s already a huge boost over someone that they’re trying to glimpse by the side of the road at 50mph. Your one sentence is a chance to show you’re polite and respectful ("Excuse me, I’m sorry to bother you") and your chance to persuade ("I’d be happy to help with the gas" powerfully invokes the principle of reciprocity — you’ve offered to help, so they’ll want to help too). That may not be enough to overcome their resistance to letting a stranger in the car, but it’s a lot more persuasive than sticking your thumb out. This is universal. Nothing makes people feel as good as helping someone out. Studies have shown that over the long term, most people get a bigger boost in happiness by giving gifts than by receiving them. If you make a connection, people will want to help you, and that could mean giving you a ride or buying from your store. I just made an unplanned purchase for $78 in the store next to the ice cream shop, because the people in there connected to me.
• Dress for Success or Birds of a feather flock together. If you look grungy, dirty and dangerous, you’ll get picked up by people who see that as normal. Your goal is to appear normal to the people your prospective ride. That doesn’t mean you necessarily want to look like your clients. You want to look like someone they can trust in this situtation. People in suits and ties don’t want mechanics in suits and ties.

In physics, power is work per unit time. Knowledge increases efficiency, but it doesn’t do anything all by itself. If I have only knowledge, nothing great happens. But as I increase my knowledge, I add a little more length to the pry bar. If I have enough pertinent knowledge, I have a huge bar. Perhaps with that lever and enough effort and persistence and courage, I can move the world. But with just a big lever, nothing happens.

I’ve spent most of my life as a scholar, believing it was the lever that mattered. It took me until my 40s to figure out that lever is just one piece.

As we left, my mother gave me a lesson that has resulted in me getting my way more times than I can count in the intervening 36 years. She said "Most people naturally want to help you and the trick is to make that easy for them. You can always yell later, but you start with a yell, you can never take it back."

Sometimes, though, it’s just satisfying to yell, even when you know it’s not in anybody’s best interest. I did it yesterday for the first time in a very long time. I’m still trying to decide whether or not it felt good.