(This post started out as a comment on fatpaddler.com, where Sean mentions crying while watching The Cove. But me, I’ll cried in anything with a sad moment. Well, anything except romantic comedies starring Sandra Bullock or Jennifer Aniston, which are sad for 120mins straight and I just can’t watch those at all.)

Dr Karl reckons crying in movies on planes is all psychological but I think it’s far too widespread for that to be the case.

I googled some studies that show a link between long-term high-altitude and changes in oxytocin reception.

Oxytocin (as we all remember as husbands who paid close attention in pre-natal classes to try and minimise the risk of being torn to pieces by our demonically-possessed spouses in-between contractions) makes us very emotional.

So, I have a hunch: that the rapid reduction in air pressure as the plane ascends affects our ability to absorb oxytocin, the hormone that makes us cry when watching movies.

Perhaps the change in air pressure (from sea level to about the same pressure as you’d get at 8,000ft) in short time it takes to get to cruising altitude might effect your oxytocin receptors quite markedly for a short period. Your brain notices the shortfall and instructs the hypothalamus to dramatically increase production.

The meal service begins, the in-flight entertainment gets going, and by the time you get through the inflight interface and the ads to the emotional part of the movie, your body has managed to catch up, and is now fully adapted to the new atmospheric pressure.

But by now, your bloodstream is flooded with all that additional oxytocin the brain had ordered. All that’s required now is a small audio-visual cue in the movie and you’ll weep.

Now, I’ve got no data to back this up, no study at all. In fact, I had a lot of trouble understanding anything real scientists had to say about oxytocin and altitude. So I can’t really call it a theory, since that would require a hypothesis and I can’t even be bothered to write one of those properly. So let’s just call it a hunch. A suspicion. An opportunity to exclaim, “Aha! I had a hunch that was the case back in 2010! If only they’d listened!” to my grandchildren (who of course won’t be at my nursing home in person. They’ll just subscribe to my lifestream and pretend they’re viewing it.)

While I’m rambling, let’s extend my hunch a bit further still: if your oxytocin receptors are affected when you suddenly gain altitude, it makes sense it also happens when you lose altitude. Perhaps when the plane descends to land, you’re left without enough oxytocin reception and that’s why you feel strangely unemotional and robotic as you leave the plane and walk into baggage claim and customs. And then the excess oxytocin washes over you right as you walk out into the crowded arrivals hall to find… nobody waiting for you again… where’s the taxi queue? [sob!]

Even so, I can tell that much of the reaction has been negative, with many writers and bloggers disappointed about a lack of innovative new technology, about lack of 3G at launch, about delays to international availability, even about the name.

Well hell, it all sounds very familiar to me: it sounds a lot like the pundit reaction to the launch of the first iPhone. Like the iPhone, the iPad is more a case of existing technologies re-imagined than bleeding-edge next-generation. Critics at the time lambasted the iPhone’s camera as too low-res, the storage as too small, the battery life as insufficient, and aside from the multi-touch interface, there was nothing cool and new for a hardware geek to fall for.

Here’s a great reason why there’s no bleeding-edge gizmos in the iPad: like the iPhone, it’s designed for a broader market of regular consumers, not geeks like me who are prepared to download a new patch every week for the first year while that bleeding-edge technology comes of age. Do that to a regular consumer and you’ve lost a customer. Apple incurs a significant cost in maintaining its high level of post-sale support and it has no reason to convert millions of new customers into frustrated, angry queues in an Apple Store the way Google has managed to do with their first consumer hardware product. (OK Google doesn’t have physical stores, but poorly curated support forums are bad for your brand, possibly worse).

While I have yet to use an iPad, I’m expecting the experience will be great. And while I think the experience will be more important than the feature set, there are still a few features of the iPad that stood out for me. Not many pundits have picked it, but the iPad isn’t the Kindle competitor we expected, the e-book and newspaper reader the media publishers were hoping would save their shrinking fiefdoms.

No, it’s all these things but they are in fact only a small part of what the iPad truly is. It’s not an e-book reader and it’s not a large iPhone. It’s not even a tablet PC as we have come to know them. After a bit of a think, I think I understand Steve Jobs: this is a new class of device — the world’s first dedicated social media device (not hella zingy as a category label, but it’s late, it’s been a big week, gimme a break.)

In this still from the iPad launch video, Scott Forstall (Snr VP iPhone Software) shows more clearly than words can say that he’s worked hard to ship the iPad.

What’s a social media device and why is this not an e-book reader or a tablet PC? Because of all the cool technology which was nevertheless not new enough to excite the geekosphere. Me? Frankly I’m amazed the authorities still haven’t discovered the growing pile of dead engineers Steve Jobs must be quickliming away in his basement to keep the others shipping this cool stuff so fast and so elegantly. Here’s what was worth a few hardware and software engineers:

iPad uses Apple’s own A4 chip instead of similar ‘ATOM’ chips from Intel

Apple’s built its own CPU before, but not since the 1980s. It’s been so long since the company shipped a product with a CPU developed in-house that Apple hasn’t just hired a new department full of top silicon designers, it even acquired specialist chip manufacturer PA Semi back in 2008. That’s a costly investment sunk in fabrication plants and people that can only be recouped over a very long-term on sales of a device on tiny margins.

It’s also a big risk for Apple to take if it wants to maintain its close relationship with Intel, which cuts the chips for the Apple desktop and laptop lines. Not only does Apple mention the A4 in their launch, they make a big deal of it and then include it in their online promotions. In contrast, there’s no mention of the chip supplier in the tech specs on the iPhone. Rub, rub, rub, in goes the salt.

Industry insiders will tell you: you don’t fuck with Intel without a very good reason. I think it means Apple isn’t viewing the iPad as “an iPhone without the phone” but as a new class of device that may be bigger than the iPhone and MacBook markets combined. The A4 chip will be the first of many such chips.

The iPhone has two orientations — portrait and landscape

But there’s only one ‘right way up’ in portrait orientation. On the iPad, any way up is the right way up. It might seem no big deal but I believe it’s huge  — it was worth the extra complexity and cost required to redesign ports and remove buttons in order to do this. Why? I think because this is the first device that can be passed from person to person without the receiver having to then adjust the orientation.

See, I can hold onto my iPad by the bottom when I pass it to you, and if you grab it by what is currently the top, when you lift it up into the vertical, the screen flips — you don’t have to flip it. Whether we’re in portrait or landscape mode. That’s a costly investment in a small detail for individual use, but it makes a significant difference if your aim is to make the iPad a highly social device.

Another big investment in making iPad highly social: an LED-backlit display with IPS

Together, these create a very bright screen, visible from a very wide viewing angle. Why? Apple wants you to be able to sit on the couch with a loved one and pore through your photos together without one of you having to sit at the far end of the couch. They want you to be able to hand an iPad showing a Keynote slide presentation to a client so they can flip through the presentation themselves, while you can still see clearly enough to talk them through it. They want children in a classroom to hand around an iPad as a collaborative multimedia learning tool (bam!, didn’t see that coming, didja? All previous tablet PCs have been corporate field devices. The iPad is a natural in the classroom or any learning environment. iPad is the device Aussie kids should get under the Federal government’s ‘a laptop for every child’ program.)

The iPad screen is 132dpi

From memory the pixel density is a little bit less than on an iPhone but still nearly twice the density of a laptop screen. Everything will be crystal clear. I think you’ll be happy lying together in bed watching a TV show or playing with an app on the iPad  — it’s light enough to hold with one hand for quite a while, and that display means if you rest it on your chest, your partner should be able to see the picture clearly. Which is why I’d hope the iPad 2.0 comes with two headphone jacks. In the meantime, you can get one of these for $30.

It’s cheaper than it could be

The iPad is much cheaper at US$499 than it could be, which is because Apple expects to earn that back many times over in content and app sales. The latter’s not so surprising, but since the market was prepared to consider a US$1000 price point, setting it at US$499 says loudly and clearly, “we want this in the hands of everybody, as soon as possible.”

It could be a real laptop competitor

Early reviews of the iPad agree that this is one fast device. It’s not multi-tasking in the precise sense of the word, but it’ll still tell you when a new email arrives while you’re working on a spreadsheet, and without a much larger screen (with the corresponding balance, integrity and portability penalties) you can’t easily multitask without lots of keyboard combinations (which are hard to do in a Multitouch interface). Trying to multitask and forgetting how much crud you have sucking cycles is a great way to slow down a device and leave a non-technical regular consumer with a problem they’re unable to solve for themselves. Besides, I’ll take 10 hours of battery life over true multitasking any day and in the meantime, Apple’s well thought-out push and badge notification system is all I really need.

iPad-specific versions of the iWork suite (also available for the first time as separate apps) means Apple may finally be serious about pushing this as a hardware/software bundle competitor to the latest ultra-mini PC laptops, Google’s OS aspirations, MS Office and Google Docs.

MobileMe cloud storage/collaboration, Office import and Office/PDF export might make this something you use instead of a laptop as well as an ebook reader.

Another clue: the first wireless keyboard accessory for an Apple Multitouch device — something we iPhone users have craved for years now. An iPad with a wireless keyboard seems functionally equivalent-plus-more than Apple’s MacBook Air. Am I wrong?

All your data, on all your devices, in sync, all the time

What use is yet another device category if it means you have to spend even more time trying to make sure you have the latest version of everything on desktop, laptop, mobile and now tablet device?

Sorted. MobileMe and several iterations of iTunes Store licensing system later, Apple is the only vendor who offers a way to have all your docs, mail, contacts, schedule, photos, music, movies, TV and apps synced across more than one device. Yes, all your iTunes content and apps are DRM-protected, but you can now buy that stuff once and then authorise, say, your iMac, your iPhone, your Macbook Pro and your iPad to all have a copy, and still have one authorisation left-over to share a game app with your kid on their iPod Touch.

While the AppleTV still has a way to go before it’s as good as the other products wearing an Apple logo, it integrates really well with the iPad. You can start a movie, TV episode or podcast on your AppleTV, pause it, and it’ll sync with your iPad, so that on the train the next day, you can hit play on the iPad and it’ll pick up exactly where you left off on the AppleTV the night before. (AppleTV already does this with iPod Touch and iPhone, though it’s not often mentioned. I think it’s a great feature, though I hope one day it’ll sync content wirelessly, not just data.)

Cool features a-plenty but there’s one thing more important than any feature

See? There are some interesting features in the iPad product launch information, but to return to the opening paragraph of this post, it’s not the list of features that make an Apple product a winner, it’s the way they’re integrated. I like to describe the typical Apple product experience as “smooth and creamy” — meaning I rarely find something illogical, interfaces are generally consistent across devices and contexts, and problems only rarely occur. Even better, with an Apple product, you experience many little “oh wow!” moments that are like chocolate sprinkles on that smooth creaminess.

If you’re underwhelmed by what you’ve read about the iPad in the last 24 hours, do yourself a favour: reserve judgment until you’re able to play with a friend’s iPad for ten minutes, or until you can walk into the nearest Apple Store and try one out. Better still, bring someone with you, because this is a social machine. If I’m right (and very occasionally I am) the smooth, creamy experience of using the iPad and sharing it with a friend will close the sale before the Apple Store staff member even has a chance to ask if they can help you with anything.

MG Siegler puts it really well on TechCrunch today, so I’ll close with a quote from his article (emphasis is mine):

When the iPhone first launched in 2007 I was sure I wasn’t going to buy one. Then I played with one. 15 minutes later I was $600 poorer. It was arguably the best tech purchase I’ve ever made.

…go play with one!

In other words, it has been a time of mixed blessings.

Thanks to everyone who’s expressed their well-wishes and support. I never realised that it’s not just about being polite — it really does help. Thanks, and I will repay those favours. We’re walking in a bubble of love created by friends and family. It’s a wonderful thing to be reminded how lucky we are to know you.

Melissa and Boy8 ham it up at New Years Eve, Byron Bay

On to other news.

Regular readers may remember Miles Campbell from our co-presentation at last year’s Interesting South conference in Sydney. Borrowing from the iconic Australian film The Castle, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Miles is an Ideas Man. His latest idea is a real corker, inspired by his frustration with organised religion vs spirituality, and by the increasingly cluttered lives we find ourselves drawn into.

Miles’ idea is beautifully simple, memorable and in my experience, useful for anyone who seeks peace, clarity and balance in their lives. It’s called ‘Shhh’ and after participating in a few pilot sessions last year, I’m looking forward to seeing Shhh go public and grow in 2010.

I had offered to help Miles with explaining Shhh, but really, he’s done such a good job on the following description, I have very little to offer. Instead, please enjoy Miles’ explanation, since it’s clear, interesting, and strikes just the right balance between proscriptive and flexible, formal and casual, serious and funny:

What is Shhh?

Shhh is born from the belief that there is meaningful experience to be discovered when a group of people share a space and are still and silent.

Many people miss out on meaningful reflective times that are created in silent ceremonies, due to the fact that they don’t share the history, beliefs, culture or practices that are part and parcel of established ritual. You can’t really participate in these times without ‘buying in’ at some level with the expressed tradition that is hosting the event.

By choosing a name which can’t be mistaken for being the expression of any particular belief system, and by banning the writing or speaking of any words during the official gathering, the ceremony is protected from any particular personality, culture, religion, belief, ego or agenda.

Anyone from any background can happily come and share the silent space with others, and be confident that they will not be expected to listen to, judge or defend anyone’s views or beliefs.

The drink and chat afterwards provides the opportunity for those who wish to enjoy the company of the friends or strangers that they have just been silent with. Some will likely discuss what the experience meant to them. This is fine, but it isn’t a part of the Shhh ceremony, it is just people talking.

Rules:

1. Be silent (that is kind of the point)
2. Be still (so you don’t distract or annoy others)
3. No kids for the time being (see 1, and 2)
4. Don’t take it too seriously, it’s just a bunch of people not talking

So, that’s Shhh — the most minimalist and individual ceremonial expression of spirituality I’ve ever seen. Interested in learning more about Shhh and how you can get involved? For the time-being Shhh invitations are limited to like-minded friends of those who attended the pilot sessions last year, because it would be better to keep learning and growing Shhh in a controlled manner for a little while longer.

So, if you’re a like-minded friend of mine, and you’d like to come along to the next Shhh, let me know — you already know how to reach me.

Me and Boy8 getting some Shhh in the Himalayas in 2007

While I’ll have a laptop, iPhone and camera with me on the North Coast, I don’t expect to be blogging much, so this is probably it for 2009.

So I’ll take this opportunity to thank you for stopping by Doing Words this year. Whether you were avidly reading every post as it was published or just following a search result for “funny status messages“, I’d like to wish you all the best for this, the next, and every subsequent festive season.

If you have a God or Goddess, I hope he, she, it or they bring you everything you were hoping for. If your God is Santa and you haven’t been naughty, I’d say your chances are pretty good. If you’re a banker, I think your chances are even better, even though you’ve been very naughty indeed.

What would I really like? I would like an agreement on an enforceable, meaningful, non-greenwashed reduction in worldwide carbon emissions in 2010, nothing more. I were ever the optimist. I would like us not to kill the Earth to death. And no, I’m not a communist or a rabid greenie. I just don’t have a lot of faith in the ability of unrestrained Capitalism to respect the needs of the environment.

While being festive, please be careful on the roads, around the Christmas tree, and especially in the bathroom (more people suffer serious head injuries in the bathroom than any part of the house, including falling off the roof). Most of all, be peaceful, and good-willing towards all men (and women and ecosystems).

‘Winter Sun, Byron Bay’ by d.i.

Why crazy? I understand that sometimes those messy, chaotic moments in startup life seem like the very things you want to forget. You’re on a mission to change the world and I’m taking photos of a three person all-hands meeting? What’s that about?

This is what it’s about: with a few years of hindsight as perspective, some of these will be the moments you miss the most and the things you’d give anything to recapture.

My job title at Doing Words is “Chief Hindsight Officer” for two reasons. I’m not just working with you because I bring the perspective of many startup experiences of my own, I’m also busy capturing as much as possible from your startup’s early history because some of it will be important to you one day.

You won’t know until you look back on it whether the person you’re meeting for a coffee will become the most important hire you ever made. You don’t know if whether that lunch appointment will result in your biggest-ever distribution deal or your biggest-ever waste of time. Perhaps that diagram we just threw up on your whiteboard is a heap of delusional crap, but maybe it includes a significant insight that will one day power not just your business but a whole ecosystem of businesses.

Crazy talk, sure, but not that unusual. And because I’ve missed enough of these pivotal moments of my own, I’m determined to capture yours if I can.

I can’t be there every day, even if you can afford me, so I’ll try to help you understand why it’s important to capture the little moments along the way, and I’ll try to tutor you to remember to capture them yourself when I’m not around.

When you boil it down to a few simple rules, it’s really not that hard. They are:

• If an external meeting isn’t subject to an NDA that specifically forbids it, try to take a photo.
• If an internal meeting isn’t disciplinary, try to take a photo and a video.
• If it goes on a whiteboard, take a photo of it with something like JotNot so the words will be legible.
• If you aren’t capturing your company processes and business rules in something like a Wiki, start immediately. If you already are, make it a key goal in someone’s metrics to keep it maintained, authoritative and consistent. Trusting it to ‘everyone’ is guaranteed to leave you with a tangled tagliatelli that makes no sense to anyone in a few years’ time.

Of course, there are some startup milestones that nobody needs a prompt to remember: the first time someone invests in your idea, the first time you go cashflow positive, and sometime between the two, the first time you have a paying customer. But there are ways and then there are ways to celebrate these more obvious milestones, and if you don’t make the time to celebrate them properly, then you are selling yourself and your team short.

One very inspiring example of remembering the first customer is this wonderful letter from makedo founder Paul Justin, which accompanied a beautifully packaged recycled cardboard bucket of the company’s creative play craft materials. Yes, Paul goes long on the big picture in his letter, but as his first customer and one of his product’s biggest fans, I want him over-the-top on this, because I’m pretty darned close to the top on it myself.

The text of his letter reads:

Dear First Ever Customer,

This is quite the moment. By receiving this package you have made reality of what was merely an idea one year ago.

Behold Makedo.

You are the first beat of the heart, the first breath of air.

I invite you to get involved and become a spirited presence in the life of makedo.
There is so much potential for what is possible, so many conversations to be had, so many ideas to be thought, and of course things to be created and shared.

We have created makedo.com.au as a place for you to think large, share your voice, express your ideas and inspire the world with your making.

Be part of the journey. Makedo was made for you.

Smiles,
Paul Justin
Inventor and founder of makedo.

Wow! Now that is a startup company that stops to remember the little-stuff-that-could-be-big. Can you tell how exciting it is to be a Makedo customer? Can you imagine how exciting it will be to be a Makedo employee or a Makedo investor? I encourage you to do the same. Don’t sweat the small stuff, but make damn sure you remember it.

Yeah, maybe, but I’m betting no. There’s a good reason why bad advice is free and good advice is expensive. Sometimes you get lucky and you can score some good advice for free, but you can waste a lot of time acting on bad advice before that happens.

In the meantime, this module in Yahoo! Answers on men’s health made me laugh.

Why Yahoo! Answers isn't my first source of medical advice

Story thumbnail photo by Editrixie.

The professionals have been doing it for a century or so (I’m looking at you, Daily Mirror, Fox News, Big Brother) but until very recently they’ve been constrained by the need to make a profit from it. We amateurs have no such constraint — we do it because we like to be watched, and because we like to think that someone is watching us.

With each passing day I learn of new ways I can say nothing interesting in front of an ever-growing audience, sitting at desks, in living rooms, glued to their mobile phone, all waiting to see what kind of nothing I’ll talk about next.

Today was a big day in Nothing Publishing, with the release of Ustream.tv’s free iPhone app, Ustream Live Broadcaster. Until now, Ustream’s thousands of nothing-broadcasting users have been stuck in front of the webcam stuck on top of their computers, and most of the video on the Ustream network is stream-of-semi-conciousness stuff, poorly-lit by a too-close LCD monitor, with heavy shadow on the wall of the den in the background.

With the release of Ustream Live Broadcaster, at last the semi-concious live video broadcasters of the world are set free to roam the pavements and hallways of the world, shuffling slowly like zombies, mouths half-agape as they try to frame the shot, try to keep it steady and think of nothing to say while they create an online poll with one finger and scout around with half an eye, looking desperately for something — anything — that might be happening, which would be twice as interesting as the nothing they’re filming right now.

I’ve installed Ustream Live Broadcaster on my iPhone, I’ve carried it with me to the car, mounted it in the windscreen cradle so my iPhone can play rather-ordinary-GPS, and then driven up to the tennis courts to pick Boy8 up from school. Nothing much happens. There’s some traffic, and I couldn’t think of nothing to say, but I’ve left the afternoon ABC news on the radio for you so you won’t fall asleep while you watch.

The best bit about this app is that I don’t need to take a hand off the steering wheel to publish my video about nothing to thousands of ‘friends’ on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. The worst bit about it is that even when my network coverage was strong, the quality of the video takes you right back to the beginning of the last century (you remember, The Century Of Everybody Watching The Same TV Show About Nothing.)

No, wait, I’m forgetting: the worst bit is, despite the technology, I still have nothing interesting to say.

Yes, we can all now broadcast live streaming video from our iPhones. Now all we need is something interesting to broadcast.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve ignored the spell-checker used by most word processing apps in OS X because I haven’t been able to get them to switch from US English (if you can call that “English”) to AU English (”strine, mate”).

Today, it finally drove me batty enough to find a solution. It was difficult to describe in a blog post so I’ve knocked together this quick little screencast. It’s really a tiny little tip, but hey, if it helps just one person, it’s enough, right?

So sit back, put your feet up, steal the super-sized bucket of popcorn from the person next to you, and be entertained while you learn…

How to get your Mac to spell with an AU English dictionary from bigyahu on Vimeo.

At the moment, most of the journalists in the world who still have paying work are paid by newspapers and magazines. And most of those journalists — whether on staff or freelance — are paid either by the number of words or pictures published, or paid a salary.

When you watch this video, take a moment to consider how much the reader is able to customise their reading material. It’s almost like no reader will read the magazine the same way. When you think about it, that’s probably true with most readers of print publications today; most of us start at the front and flip pages, but many of us start on a favourite section and hop around from section to section.

But readers on a Tablet will be sending back pageview and session time data to a server somewhere, and a tablet content publishing platform worth its hosting bill will be able to tell a publisher exactly which pages and which graphics were viewed by each reader, and how long they spent there.

For the first time in mainstream publishing it will be possible to know the worth of every page of copy and every image or video, in terms of views and time spent. As media publishers are under cost and revenue pressures right now, how long will it be before some of them decide to pay journalists and photographers based on the actual time the audience was engaged with their material? How long will it be before we learn whether that high-falutin’ conservative columnist is really worth four times the hard-working kid on the sports results every weekend? How long before freelance journalists, photographers and video journalists are paid on a metric based on the audience their content attracted and engaged with?

To the blogger community out there, this will come as old news — they’ve been on the bleeding edge of this new content publishing economy for years — but in the old-school media companies it could be a rude shock. The bad news from the blogosphere is that getting paid for your audience pays way less than getting paid a nice salary associated only with your job title, and to some extent, your experience measured in years and the list of other mastheads you’ve worked for in the past.

The good news is: the ad possibilities showcased in the video from Time, Inc. look really exciting. On a bright, hi-resolution screen on your lap, why wouldn’t you click on a few to see what they do? More time and interaction with ads means more potential ad revenue, and more ad revenue might mean more to share with journalists. I only hope print media publishers don’t make the same mistake as the online portal publishers and pepper their front pages with ads that take over your entire screen to show you a painfully craptastically adapted television commercial before you get to read your headlines. Dear Mr Jobs: please make a ban on such indignities a condition of licensing the Tablet publishing tools!

“Twitter is like a big dinner party with a group of interesting friends who are having several conversations on different topics at the same time. You’re able to dip in and out of conversations around the table. Sometimes you contribute, sometimes you just listen, and sometimes you pick up on something interesting from one conversation and carry it across to another conversation to share it there. You don’t need to be paying attention to everything all the time — if you need to go to the bathroom you can get an update when you return or just relax and enjoy how the conversations have evolved since you left.”

Twitter is like a sushi train restaurant because a sushi train has a wide variety of bite-sized morsels — and Twitter offers a variety of bite-sized ideas/complains/jokes/whatever. Like a sushi train, you can select the morsels you like and maybe share some of it with your companions to either side. And like a sushi train, things don’t disappear — they go around and around, and if one serve of salmon sashimi is taken, there’ll be another one around in a minute.

Kevin Marks talking about the flow-past web and more at Web 2.0 Expo recently.

Dear Bigyahu, esteemed Woot veteran -

You’ve been here from the beginning, or almost the beginning. You saw Woot grow from a weird little deal-a-day site into a whole bunch of weird little deal-a-day sites. You saw us change our colors from eggplant to broccoli & carrots to pea soup. None of the two million new members who have come along since then can say they have your Woot cred. Without your early support, none of those two-million-plus would even know Woot existed.

So we’re hoping you don’t think our newest idea sucks. It’s called Deals.Woot, and it lives at http://deals.woot.com and start clicking. Check everything out. Ask questions. Try to break stuff. Apply the same ruthless diligence to Deals.Woot as you have to the mothership. Our oldest friends are our best BS detectors, and we’re counting you on you to start detecting and let us know what you find.

And thanks a million – or two million – for helping create the big, unwieldy ball of discount energy that is Woot today. Long may it roll…

the Deals.Woot dev team

Sure, there are some little things I’d correct, but in the face of writing something functional and specific, whoever writes the site copy at Woot.com has written something funny, intelligent and genuine. It is also guaranteed to make a Woot customer feel special. Not like those clowns at VirginBlue.

Now, to my point: just because you work for a big, stuffy corporation and not a startup, even though you’re tasked with writing something functional and specific for customers to read, take a moment to do it better. Find a way to add some spice — a trace of humour, confidence, real concern, plain English — whatever you’d love to use to make it stand out in a crowded Inbox.

I know. Your manager will most likely surgically excise it and customers will never see it. But that won’t change the fact that you wrote it, that you’re proving yourself capable of writing it, and that one day you’ll get the chance to write for an organisation that will be ready for it. By then you will have years of practice at doing it and will be as good as Woot’s copywriter, whoever they may be.

In the meantime, stick it to the man by watching Woot.com’s ‘Learn More’ video, which is even funnier, and while not functional at all, worth every moment of viewing time.

Mortimer & Monte: In the Break Room, episode 3 from Woot Video on Vimeo.

The greater risk is that the industry may turn away from Apple if groupthink decides that Apple’s strategy is flawed. We’ve seen it before.

Could Google's Android Market really overtake Apple's iTunes Store?

“Instant publishing” versus “approval process” is an old battle in online publishing, arising from the classic ‘cathedral and bazaar‘ dilemma. The ‘cathedral’ is a marketplace ‘curated’ by expert specialists to ensure quality, conformity and fraud-free experiences. The ‘bazaar’ is a marketplace where ‘caveat emptor’ is the only rule, and consumer-driven social media tools are the way users avoid bad experiences, bad software and bad people.

Bazaars naturally grow wider and faster. Cathedrals are naturally less prone to the risk of law suits and prosecutions. Both good things to have. But if you can’t easily choose both, which do you choose?

It’s extremely hard to design curation process that scales to the massive growth and depth of the world’s online creativity with its cultures, subcultures, languages, niches and special interests. If you don’t curate, the threat of getting your ass sued or prosecuted by customers, competitors, regulatory authorities and whole geographies can be enough to scare investors away before you even get started.

It takes more than building and then opening the floodgates to make a successful bazaar. You need location, momentum, viralocity and an engaged customer community that’s prepared to do some of your curation via social media tools. If you don’t open a bazaar, you risk being overtaken by a larger, more dynamic community of users.

Can you do both? Usually, no. It’s easy to end up with twice the cost of curation and half the benefit of the bazaar. You can see what that looks like on Nokia’s Ovi platform. Epic fail.

Cathedrals are sooo uncool

In many publishing settings, a cathedral-based system is best, but cathedrals are sooo uncool, and being uncool can cost you industry sentiment, which can cost you… well, everything in business. I learned this valuable lesson while working at Yahoo! a decade ago.

See, at the beginning, Yahoo!’s founders felt that new submissions to our directory should be reviewed by a team of highly-trained and skillful curators (who we called Yahoo! Surfers.) They would ensure not just that they were good enough to help our users find what they wanted but also that we were able to list them in the correct spot in the Yahoo! directory. One of the earliest hires at Yahoo! was Srinija Srinivasan, an expert ontologist, to guide our curation strategy. She was (still is, maybe) a Dewey Decimal Rockstar and her team of web surfers were some of the best available, all specialist subject experts, information theoreticians and librarians.

The Yahoo! directory was great quality content. You were really hard-pressed to find a bad website or a poorly placed listing in our directory. And of course, very early on, we knew our model was never going to scale to the growth and scope of the interweb — it could never include every website that was submitted to our surfers. To cover the rest — to have one foot in the bazaar — we worked with Inktomi, AltaVista and a tiny startup called Google to provide search engine results to cover the rest of the web.

Unfortunately, as the Long Tail became the coolest idea in the industry, it seemed like Yahoo! was outsourcing its Long Tail solution to Google. That was a concern to the industry and it began turning the market as a whole against Yahoo! as the best way to find stuff on the web. Now, the number of search results mattered more than the nature of the search results. While Yahoo!’s solution was still helpful, it wasn’t the coolest thing in town, Google was. Users, advertisers and the new SEO optimisation flocked to Google. Everything Yahoo! attempted to claw back that leading perception now felt like catch-up, and it attracted derision and disbelief — sometimes because it was merited, but often just because it was something from Yahoo!.

Uhoh, iTunes Store is a cathedral, Google is a bazaar

Undoubtedly, iTunes Store is one of the biggest, uncoolest cathedrals in technology. Whether you’re publishing music, TV, movies, podcasts or apps for the iPhone and iPod Touch, every piece of content must be reviewed and approved by somebody at Apple.

Like all classic cathedrals, Apple keeps all information on its approval processes and procedures very close to its chest. There is very little information from the company about how the approval process works, how long it takes, and what happens if your content gets rejected.

There are many good reasons for this: it’s valuable proprietary information, it is probably evolving rapidly and subject to change, and in many cases there is probably a large element of grey area to deal with — editorial calls need to be made unhindered by complex rules and regulations.

There are many bad reasons for this too — it doesn’t just fail to scale with the growth of the web, but it encourages industry speculation in the form of tweets, blog posts, conference sessions and industry gossip. All that backchannel discussion is negative, and in our hyper-connected online community, it can easily gain enough momentum to become an unstoppable meme that makes the hop from industry to consumer communities, like the one I saw crush Yahoo! as a search destination.

Meanwhile, Google’s Android marketplace is much more like a classic bazaar. It’s easier for developers to get apps out on the Android market, but that doesn’t necessarily help them market, merchandise or build a relationship with new customers. Frankly, Google sucks at both curating and marketing, if its Android,  OpenSocial and iGoogle marketplaces are anything to go by. They are all designed for developers first and foremost, with very little thought given to how to create an engaging ‘retail’ experience for consumers.

Do consumers actually want a bazaar for their phone?

Thing is, consumers and app publishers are not a single community — they actually have very different needs from an app marketplace. I don’t think the frustration Joe Developer feels with mysterious app approval processes should make the jump to Joe iPhone Owner.

Most consumers really don’t want a bazaar when it comes to apps right now, especially on mobile phones. An iPhone or an Android phone brings your essential personal information closely together with entertainment, sure, but none of us wants to install anything that might be a security risk or that might impair our ability to make a quick and simple phone call.

Mobile phones have limited screen real estate and input methods that make it harder to browse, evaluate and personalise large volumes of apps. Even when new apps only cost a dollar, most consumer iPhone owners I’ve observed tend to choose one app per category and stick with it if it’s well-designed and well-supported. They would rather have the best app recommended to them by an expert editor than have the choice of 100 apps in one category they need to evaluate and decide on themselves.

xkcd: oh yes, there's an app for that!

Can Apple have a foot in the bazaar too?

Sure, Apple could do a better job of implementing ratings, user reviews and ‘genius’ recommendations to help users recommend the best apps in cluttered categories.

It would really help Apple if it made the review processes for all content sold in the iTunes Store less opaque and unpredictable. There has to be a reasonable middle ground between Apple’s usual default of extreme privacy and giving away trade secrets. Publishers should be able to login to a dashboard of some kind, something that could show a timeline of the stages of the approval process, the average waiting time, the number of apps ahead and behind, all your apps, and flags for any outstanding issues.

Apple’s relevant people should be prepped and allowed to speak about this whole set of issues, to industry conferences, trade publications and in blogs and online documentation. Can you name your favourite ‘iTunes Store Industry Evangelist’? Or even an ‘iTunes Store Publishing Genius’? That’s a terrible omission.

Once an app is on iTunes Store, Apple could really do a better job of providing marketing data on consumer interaction with the app in terms of views, clicks, purchases, as well as anonymised data from apps in the same category to use as a benchmark.

It would also really help if Apple worked on extending its lead on helping developers and publishers market and merchandise their content on iTunes Store. There’s currently no advertising space on iTunes Store — everything is either algorithmically determined or chosen by an iTunes Store editor. Why not lock out some space for publishers to pay to market their apps?

Apple also does nothing to help you market your app outside iTunes Store aside from allowing you to copy and paste the url of the app and the publisher in iTunes Store. Why not provide an RSS or Atom feed of positive reviews and star ratings? Make it easier to create a video of the app in play? Make it easier for app developers to contact customers who’ve bought an app previously?

Industry: you are not a good use-case

If you take just one thing from this lengthy article, take this: we in the industry are not typical consumers. I, for instance, have purchased 139 iPhone apps! That’s extreme, but none of us is the mainstream Joe Consumer by the very fact that we work in the industry and we invest much more in this than Joe Consumer. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that what’s best for the iPhone app developer community is also best for the iPhone consumer community. Think before you lobby for bazaar over cathedral.

More good reading on this topic:

• Ars Technica: respected developers fleeing iTunes Store
• Manton Reece: The only two fixes for iTunes Store
• Fred Wilson: The power of instant approval

I’ve been writing EDMs lately and that’s prompted a blog post or two on how to do it better.

This morning Facebook sends me what may be the least interesting EDM to land in my inbox in the past 12 months.

I know Facebook has some tight brand and interface guidelines, but it’s got to be hurting their EDM open rates.

The only reason I’d open this one is to lambast them on Doing Words!

Let’s count the sins they’ve committed…

The Apple Mail preview pane view of this email tells a story. And it's a long, boring story that nobody wants to read (but click the image to see a larger version).

Fails the glance test

Most email users make a quick instinctive decision based on a glance at the preview pane in their email client. If it’s engaging and exciting, open it now. If it’s not, maybe read it later, maybe delete it without reading. Glance at this preview pane section of this email and tell me honestly, is there anything that draws the eye in a glance? No. Glance-worthy content includes:

1. Bright, colourful and surprising images;
2. Large, dynamic headlines (usually rendered as images to allow you to use interesting typography), and (drum roll)
3. Exciting offers targeted at the reader, not the marketing director

Wasting the preview zone

The part of the EDM seen in the preview pane of the email client is the only part of the email viewed by most customers. If your open rates are an industry average three percent, 97% or less of your customers will see only the preview pane. Every pixel of space in the preview zone is precious and vertical pixels are twice as precious as horizontal. Look how many vertical pixels are wasted on the dark blue brand banner, the bland pale blue headline zone and the unremitting blandness of the layout and copy in the remainder. Look at how the title “Facebook Ads newsletter” is duplicated in the preview zone and the subject line of the EDM.

Wasting the subject line

After the preview zone, the most important variable determining open rates is the subject line of your EDM. I’ve written about this before and it’s an industry-wide problem, but there’s no point saying “Facebook Ads newsletter” in the subject line when the from: address says “Facebook Ads” and the content is obviously all about advertising on Facebook. EDMs have no space for redundancy and the-bleeding-obvious. Waste the reader’s scanning time and they won’t waste any further time opening your email. Make the subject line include the most exciting news item in your newsletter.

Painfully terrible copy

The copy in your preview zone must sizzle, zing and pop, in 25 words or less. Instead we have turgid crud like this:

In addition to harnessing the social graph by targeting your connections’ friends, every “Friends of connection” targeted ad promoting a Page or Event includes social content about a friend’s interaction with your business, amplifying the relevancy of your ad.

[Shudder]. I might have rewritten this as:

Did you know you can make your Page or Event ad more relevant by adding your connections’ friends?

The copy in the preview zone’s main story is 233 words total without saying anything exciting that couldn’t be said more engagingly in 50 words and a diagram. One sentence is 39 words!

Each year my wife and son and I try to find the time to go on a journey together and have at least one really extraordinary experience.

This year, we travelled to Tonga. Scott Portelli and the team at Swimming With Gentle Giants took us swimming in shallow tropical seas with humpback whales and their calves.

My own little digital camera, while waterproof, was about as clear as Mr Magoo, and it’s taken until now to see the beautiful stills and moving images captured by Scott, who moonlights as a professional underwater photographer when he’s not whale-guiding and being creative at a big Sydney agency.

Here’s a video that really captures what the experience was like. It cost us less than a ski holiday, and was far more memorable. I don’t know how long it will be possible to swim with whales in Tonga, and this is the only location in the world where it’s legal to do so.

So get in touch with Scott if you want to have an extraordinary experience of your own..

Like unknown thousands of other VirginBlue customers, my wife, Boy8 and I all received an email from VirginBlue telling us that, even though we hadn’t yet earned enough points to qualify, the decision had been made to upgrade us all to ‘Gold’ — the top tier of the VirginBlue frequent flyer program.

VirginBlue's nice surprise that quickly turned nasty.

The following morning, we all received an email telling us in a brief and casual manner that a mistake had been made, we weren’t getting the upgrade, and VirginBlue wished us their “warm regards.”

And then, this email, which really couldn't have been handled any worse.

The effects of that email are still rippling through trade press, online media, Twitter and the blogosphere and will probably be in the weekend’s papers when I’ve had a shower and walked the dog to the shop.

Like most other customers who received the email, I feel like I’ve been treated shabbily by a brand that cared about its relationship with me. Unlike most other customers, I understand why the email made me feel that way, and what VirginBlue could have done differently to salvage the customer relationship it has enjoyed until now.

This will be hard for the IT department to understand, but it wasn’t so much that the error occurred, it was how VirginBlue handled the communication that has caused the crisis. The two emails couldn’t have been more inflammatory if they’d been deliberately written to offend. Allow me to break it down:

So some customers get a better deal than I do?

The first email made a big deal of how I’d been upgraded even though I hadn’t earned enough points. So now I know that even when the system is working perfectly, some customers get upgraded before they’ve earned enough points. That’s an unfairness in the business rules that should not have been communicated so widely, and when it was, should have been the primary focus of the communication. Something along the lines of, “we’ve reviewed our business rules in light of the system error and have revised our policy so that in future, no members will be discriminated against on their qualification for upgrade.”

The economics of rewards points

For me as a Red level member, being granted Gold status would bring significant benefits that I would value far higher than their likely cost to VirginBlue (that is, after all, the way points systems are designed to work.) To upgrade and then downgrade a customer — to reveal and then remove benefits of high personal value — is a big deal and it has a significant effect on your relationship with most customers affected.

VirginBlue (and anybody operating a loyalty program) must remember the true value of reward points is not their cost to the company but the way they make the customer feel.

Don’t be casual when you apologise — always over-do it

VirginBlue way underestimated the impact of the error to follow-up with a brief generic email beginning “Ooops!”. This was always going to end in bad publicity, but a better email could have softened the blow and salvaged the customer relationship.

The email should have been personal — from person to person, not from brand to person. It should have been written in the name of a VirginBlue senior executive with a signature and a photograph at the end of the email.

Next, the email should have detailed the approx. number of customers affected by the error, the cause of the error in layperson’s terms (not just “a system error”) and the steps taken to ensure it doesn’t happen again. Being too brief about it just gives the impression the company doesn’t take it seriously and doesn’t care if it happens again.

How to let them down more gently

Detailing the approx. number of customers affected helps segue into the most difficult — but most important — part of the email: explaining that it’s not possible to honour the upgrade promise.

When I received the second email, I was not one of thousands of affected customers, I felt like the only customer affected. It was only because I bothered to search for information online that I realised I wasn’t the only one affected. The email sent only said, “you do not qualify for that upgrade.”

The final element of a better email communication would have been to offer some small token gift in reparation. If VirginBlue values the customer relationship it has with me, it should show that it cares about the damage to that relationship by administering itself a penalty.

We’ve already talked about how points programs work because customers value rewards more than their cost to the company, so any small reward given at this point will earn VirginBlue more in customer relationship value than the bottom-line impact.

While offering affected customers a small token reward doesn’t add up to the benefits of Gold status, it does at least make the customer feel like VirginBlue cares enough to punish itself for the mistake. VirginBlue deliberately positions itself as the underdog in the Australian domestic aviation market and fosters an “us-against-the-establishment” relationship with its regular customers. That relationship only works if VirginBlue shows it values its customer relationships more than its competitors do.

By making such a dramatic error and then doing such a bad job of communicating it, VirginBlue starts to look much more like the establishment than the underdog.

She says much that is insightful in her post “When giving presentations, the only rule that matters is the rule of attention.” Here’s the best snippet (in case you too suffer from a short attention span):

Concentrate on the rules of attention. The thing you most want during a presentation is people’s attention, so everything you do and say has to be about capturing that, and then keeping it. The rules of attention are more or less universal, easier to demonstrate empirically than rules about specific slide formats, and can be neatly summarised as follows: people get bored easily.

Here’s some more great points from Chris I hadn’t heard anybody else say before, along with my thoughts on them:

Stories help keep people’s attention

We’ve been listening to stories and learning through stories for as long as we’ve had language. When told a story, we always want to learn what happened next, even if so far we haven’t enjoyed the story very much. Can you make a story out of your presentation? I can remember several talks I’ve given where the feedback afterwards was, “I don’t really remember what you talked about but I really enjoyed listening to the story you told.” If you can’t make the learning stick, being an entertaining speaker is good consolation!

People really like looking at screens

It’s true. I could be in a pub, sitting across from the sexiest woman in the world, she may be part-way through telling me how much she wants to take me to bed, and my attention will constantly be distracted by the colours and movement of the sport channel on the flat-screen TV on the wall behind her. And I’m not a fan of spectator sports.

I’m a male human, I’ve evolved as an endurance hunter of small game, and the visual processing part of my brain is wired to be distracted by fast moving, brightly coloured objects. Believe me, I want to have sex with the woman (especially because the sexiest woman in the world happens to be the woman I’m married to) and I know my flickering attention is going to make that much less likely, but I just can’t help it — I’m wired that way.

Screens are almost a compulsory part of modern presentations, and their very attractiveness makes them both your best friend and your worst adversary. If your slides are good and you need an audience to stop looking at your slides and focus on what you have to say for a moment, you really have your work cut out for you.

Chris recommends using the B or W buttons on the keyboard, which in both PowerPoint and Keynote will make the screen go black or white, respectively. Now, she says, people will focus on you, at least until you hit that B or W button again.

True, but when I’m talking, I’m usually far away from a keyboard, and interrupting my flow to walk over to where the keyboard is and hit a button is usually going to create an even bigger distraction from what I have to say than leaving my slide up there.

My workaround (your mileage may vary) is to have a black slide ready to go up while I talk. I believe black works better than white, since black conveys a sense of anticipation and a big white space on a really big screen can be such a change in room lighting that people will look away to allow their eyes to adjust (which is exactly what I don’t want them to do.)

Remember to take your black slides out of your presentation before posting them to your blog or slideshare.

If you need to use an arresting image to hold your audience's attention, make sure it's somehow relevant, and make sure it's something they're not likely to have seen before. (Photo: Last Mariner)

Sustaining attention needs frequent changes

Chris talks about the need for frequent changes in a presentation if you’re to keep people’s attention focused on you, which is true, but the most important thing is to “…change stuff mindfully.”

By that she means, don’t just dump in a bit of clip art or a photo at some random point. Changes have to be inserted so that one idea flows to the next idea but the changes refresh the mind. I find that establishing a rhythm can help you do this. For instance, aim for one surprising slide at the end of each major point instead of the more typical “before we get started, here’s a surprising/funny photo or a shocking statistic on my first slide.”

If you’re going to aim to shock, amuse or surprise your audience with a change, please, please, please test it first on a small sample of likely audience members. Nothing falls flatter than a YouTube clip that your audience has already been sent way too many times by email, a photo that likewise has been over-exposed, or a statistic or study that you think is shocking but has already been critically reviewed and debunked by the opinion-leaders your audience follows.

Thumbnail photo ‘Distracted‘ by Left-Hand.

Every time you send an email to a customer, they can:

Open, read and respond to it;

Open and read it;

Delete it without reading it;

Unsubscribe from it; or

Flag it as spam.

You’d imagine that the consumer judges each new unread email from you independently of previous emails. But you’d be wrong.

The hidden gotcha with email marketing is the cumulative effect of response. A Pavlovian (or perhaps more accurately, Skinner-ian) effect in which customers will begin repeating the same response they had to your previous emails.

Send a few emails to someone that they delete without reading, and the odds begin to increase that they will delete the next email from you, no matter what’s in the email itself. They are increasingly  likely to repeatedly delete emails over time, even if it those emails now include a generous reward targeted exactly at them. The odds also increase that they may unsubscribe on the next email, or flag your email as spam, moving ‘down’ the list of options above.

In short, customers will behave like Skinner’s pidgeons, and instead of ringing the bell in return for a food pellet, they will be increasingly likely to ignore email communication from you.

Just like pigeons, customers can be trained to do just about anything.

That cumulative response pattern can go either way — upwards toward response or downwards towards unsubscribing and flagging you as spam.

You’d like to think most reasonable people would try unsubscribing but a large percentage of any random sample will go straight from deleting to flagging as spam. In my observations, as much as 20-25% of users will skip straight from (3) Delete Without Reading to (5) Flag It As Spam.

In our busy modern lives, extra reading for the sake of extra reading does not make us feel wanted, or loved, or appreciated. It makes us feel like this business does not understand our needs, that it treats all its customers the same, and that it has nothing interesting to say.

So if all your email communication is either improving or damaging your customer relationships, how do you make sure you’re trending up the list from the first email and not down towards losing the opportunity to communicate with a customer?

The biggest single influence I’ve observed is the content of the email subject field. Write a great subject line, and you will get an open. Write a subject line that does nothing but prompts the decision to open the email, and response is more likely to follow.

Recently I signed up for a new service and their email email newsletter subject began “[Company Name] News Vol. X” and I had to wonder what they were thinking.

The original purpose of putting a volume number on a publication was for print periodicals that had to be referred to by volume number for archiving and recall. You might feel that this heritage feel might be comforting or add character, but it has no place in the email marketing world. You just wasted a few precious characters you could have used to deliver an engaging subject line and you wasted a tiny fraction of your customer’s time with something that you care about but the customer doesn’t. You’re off on the wrong foot, trending down towards ‘delete without reading’ before you’ve even told them anything.

If you must put a unique ID on your emails for your own reference, put that somewhere in the HTML or below the footer so it doesn’t interrupt the reader.

Meanwhile, reserve the subject line of your emails for the most exciting news you have to share with the customer. And remember that by “exciting” I mean “exciting for the customer” not “exciting for your business.”

Finally, here’s my most important rule of email marketing:

If you don’t have something engaging to say, don’t say anything at all.

Some marketing folks get all caught up in the idea that a regular schedule of email communication deepens the relationship with the customer. I’m calling bollocks on that one: does receiving a bill on the same day of the month make you feel any closer to the phone company? No, it does not. In our busy modern lives, extra reading for the sake of extra reading does not make us feel wanted, or loved, or appreciated. It makes us feel like this business does not understand our needs, that it treats all its customers the same, and that it has nothing interesting to say.

Worst of all, it trains us to ignore future emails. Or worse: flag them as spam. Now, I’ve written my blog post, where’s my food pellet?

Update: Perkler implemented some of the recommendations in this blog post and have reported an increase in open rates from 2.0% to  3.4% (industry average is about 3%). Yay!

myFontbook.com lets me flip through a library of fonts and see type samples just as I’d like to do in Font Book. It’s cool because it loads fast and looks just like an app running in OS X, not at all like like a browser-based app it is. And it’s slightly spooky because it’s not just displaying a generic library of fonts — it’s displaying the fonts I have installed on my Mac. Learning how it does that will probably make my simple brain hurt so let’s not go there; instead lets just wonder at the magic that allows it to happen.

It works with all modern browsers (that does not include you, IE6.x users) and only seems to have rendering problems with some condensed versions of some font families.

myFontbook.com is free and you don’t even need to register (though if you do it’ll remember your font library and the collections and tags you add to manage them.)

I particularly like that it will display a few columns of body type in 8, 10 and 12pt sizes. It’ll even print out a nicely-formatted proof sheet.

Once again, I am a font of all knowledge.

Today I’m deeply in awe of American singer/songwriter Jonathan Coulton (I’m probably the last person in the world to discover him, sorry, I’m just not that cool).

Jonathan is geeky enough to have worked as a software developer for a few years and he releases songs about geeky subjects like writing code, Benoit Mandelbrot, Robot Santa Claus, bacteria and DNA. His fans maintain a healthy and extensive wiki on the man and his music. He releases his songs (regular and karaoke versions) in high bit-rate MP3 and FLAC formats and all of them are available under a Creative Commons license.

And of course, he’s @jonathancoulton on Twitter. Yes, he’s geeky.

Coulton nicely expresses the challenges of being a geek in a corporation in his song Code Monkey. Here’s a lyric sample:

“…Code Monkey have boring meeting
With boring manager Rob
Rob say Code Monkey very diligent
But his output stink
His code not “functional” or “elegant”
What do Code Monkey think?
Code Monkey think maybe manager want to write goddamn login page himself…”

This is geek life; the internal dialogue of the frustrated programmer and his daily struggle to find inspiration and creativity in menial software development. Here’s a great Machinima video clip for Code Monkey which combines coding and World Of Warcraft. FTW!

The following post, on finding a healthy work/life balance and how to recognise one when you find it, is essentially one of Miles’ emails, slightly edited by me. Over to you, Miles…

To be well, most of us should work for the following reasons:

1. The stabilising routine it adds to life;
2. The sense of accomplishment it gives us;
3. The community it provides us with;
4. The sense of identity it provides us;
5. The amount of the week that it distracts us; and
6. Finally, the money it provides us.

The optimum job, in my opinion, has the following characteristics:

1. It should take up about 30-40 hours a week (including commuting time).  This should drop to 20-30 hours a week if you have children under 10.
2. It should be close to home.  Ideally walking distance
3. You should enjoy the community that you work in.
4. You should do work where at least 60% of your time is spent doing something that you are good at
5. You should look forward to a day of work
6. Work should be the right mix of challenge and mastery depending on your personality.
7. You should work hard

Overthink, Overwork, Overorganize (Photo by Quinn.Anya)

It seems to me that most people in our society either work too much or too little. For many of those who work too much, I am convinced that they could achieve the same outcomes in much fewer hours. Work generally expands to fill the time available. I believe that most people do between four and six hours a day of effective work.  If a work culture exists whereby people arrive at 8am and don’t leave till 6pm, then they will stuff around and be inefficient, and hold unnecessarily long meetings etc. to kill time until they can go home. Once you are away from home for more than eight hours a day, then the rest of life will be a compromise. Exercise, friendships, marriages, parenting, hobbies, sleep, household maintenance, celebrations, socialising etc will all be compromised. If you are on a salary, then it can be almost impossible to work sensible hours, as you must toe the line.

For those who work too little, it’s generally either because they have young children, or they are retired, or can’t find a job. Though this can be nice for a while, I think there is a danger that in the long run, the loss of all those things that work provides can make it difficult to maintain well being.  I think a lot of mothers (and a few dads) get caught out because they look to parenting to provide their work needs, but whereas a great career has long term prospects, parenting suddenly dumps you when the children become independent.  You then have to start again which can be hard.  Having said that, it’s not like most families have many options.  Our workplaces are built around most people working 45 – 50 hour weeks with another 10 hours of commuting on top.  This means that someone generally has to bail from their job once kids come along.

“I’m spending money I don’t have, to buy things I don’t need, to impress people I don’t like.”

Some people work too much, earn heaps of money and then retire, therefore working too little.  I think that people will generally survive this and make the best of it, but I don’t think it’s ideal.  It is a common cause of depression.  I think that it’s much better if people can work a sensible amount until they can no longer work.

I also believe that most people don’t walk their own talk.  Most people will tell you that money isn’t going to make them happy, but they don’t live that way.  Most people end up sacrificing huge amounts of what they claim is important in order to earn more money.  What’s that great line?… “I’m spending money I don’t have, to buy things I don’t need, to impress people I don’t like.”  I think that beneath this is our survival instinct.  We have an irrepressible instinct to gather resources.  We live with constant anxiety that we won’t have financial security, which drives us to work more and more.  Then kicks in our instinct to consume (for the pleasure hit) and to keep up with the jones’s (fear of rejection from the group).

The risks of working too much are far greater than the risks of not earning enough.

I often coach myself through this anxiety with statements along the lines of “What is the likely outcome of me not earning enough money to maintain my current lifestyle?”.  When you are able to rationally think it through you realise that you could quite easily cut down spending, or move to a smaller house or move to a cheaper city.  No one starves in Australia.  When you look rationally at what are the most likely negative outcomes in your life, they are far more likely to be the result of working too much than from earning too little.  In saying this I am assuming that working too much is taking it’s toll on relationships, friendships and your mental health.  This kind of stuff can then lead to unhappy marriages (or divorce), loneliness, anxiety, substance abuse, health problems (due to stress, poor eating and lack of exercise).  So I think that the risks of working too much are far greater than the risks of not earning enough.  I also think that for a lot of guys, that working hard is a simple way to justify their lives.  Keeping everything balanced is complicated, whereas an obsessive work life can be quite simple, and if there are the added benefits of doing a job that you are good at, and you are well rewarded, and you seem to be important in that domain, it’s a way to have some sense of meaning and control in a nice simple formula.

here endeth the rant.

cheers
miles