He has now published a book called Free (The Future of a Radical Price: The Economics of Abundance and Why Zero Pricing Is Changing the Face of Business). The book is not free, it’s about €18.99 as pointed out in Malcolm Gladwell’s review of the book.

Gladwell is another thought provoking writer and it is worth reading Anderson’s original article, then read the review and then for laughs read a third thought provoking author’s view on it from Seth Godin.

For the record? All three authors have interesting points to make but (admittedly without having read the book) I like Gladwell’s analysis best.

Books of this type like to put forward black and white theories on how things are, how things will be or how things should be done. Gladwell too may be guilty of this in his own books, but he speaks the truth here:

The only iron law here is the one too obvious to write a book about, which is that the digital age has so transformed the ways in which things are made and sold that there are no iron laws.

There will always be a place for free. But on the internet some tend to assume free is a right, but we should be mindful of being bullied into being free without a solid plan in place to actually generate revenue.

That said, I look forward to reading the book as a thought provoker.

FuelYourCreativity.com are looking for some cool t-shirt designs to put in their shop, anyone can submit an idea, and if your design is used you get a percentage of the sales.

On the left is the Fuel Your Creativity logo / branding, above is the idea I came up with, and below is how it might look on a t-shirt.

In accordance with the guidelines for taking part I put the concept up on Flickr – if you have comments, please head over to Flickr and leave a comment – thanks!

There are times when logging on to Twitter all you see is a list of “RT @thisperson”, “RT @thatperson” and updates with “pls RT” appended to them. And of course the retweeting often means you are seeing the same update over and over from various people.

Retweeting can make Twitter a pretty noisy, and echoey place at times.

If everyone had the option of seeing @replies to people they did not follow, the need for retweeting would diminish somewhat. By removing the option you make ReTweeting a more vital part of discovering new people.

As long as you can see @replies to people you don’t follow, and people send @replies instead of retweeting you will be alerted to the original posters update, and you have gained some insight into the replier’s viewpoint on it.

A retweet on the other hand is a passive form of update – you can assume the ReTweeter agrees or likes it, but they are simply repeating what another person has said.

The problem is that retweets are now seen as currency, and I think it’s largely because most people were not seeing @replies to people they were not following, therefore if you wanted to be heard outside your circle people had to add text such as RT before the @name in order for people who were not following you to see the update.

If you wanted to get more followers, or get your content seen by more people, you had to get people to retweet you. But if everyone could see @replies to people they are not following they would become aware of you through the interesting conversations you had with the people they do follow.

Twitter say that only 3% of people chose to see @replies to people they did not know, but then they also admitted on the settings page that “The @ Replies setting can be confusing. Read the help article if you’re unsure” – perhaps this confusion was part of what led to the low take up of the feature.

If everyone had the clear option of seeing all @replies, the retweet could take it’s proper place as a useful tool for certain types of updates. Not the holy grail of updates some people seem to think it is.

At a large party you can drift around pausing to talk to people you know. If they are engaged in conversation with strangers, you can join in if you find it interesting. Now imagine a party where all your friends are constantly coming up to you saying “Did you hear what this guy said? He said…”

I know which party I’d rather be at.

1. I registered as frankiep
2. I decided I would like to capitalise to FrankieP
3. Twitter said “That’s You!” and then “Username already in use”
4. Decided to try changing username to something different and then back to FrankieP
5. Twitter wouldn’t let me change back to FrankieP or frankiep saying username was already in use
6. frankiep and FrankieP still resolved to my account for 48 hours
7. After 48 hours they resolved to another users account – which was last updated 16 days prior to my username change
8. I have lost my username due to a glitch and I would really like it back.
9. I would love frankiep back, would ideally want FrankieP, and in an ideal world both would resolve to my profile!

The long version

Registered frankiep & couldn’t change to capitalised version

I registered with Twitter as frankiep. I was happy enough, but one day I decided that I would be happier if I had FrankieP – same username but with capitalisation. So I did some research and found conflicting reports on the web about whether capitalisation would be a different username, or the same one.

The only thing to do was to try and change my name – so I went into the settings and tried to change from frankiep to FrankieP. No luck – twitter told me the username was already in use.

I checked, and both http://twitter.com/frankiep and http://twitter.com/FrankieP resolved to my account.

Could change to capitalised version FrankieP temporarily

A couple of days later, Twitter implemented some cool changes in their web interface, and I wondered if by any chance they had fixed the problem which was preventing me from capitalising my username. So I went into the settings to try again – this time when I edited my username to FrankieP the interface when checking availability told me “That’s You!”.

When I then tried to save the change, Twitter told me that it couldn’t save because the username was already in use, but my account would show as FrankieP until I logged out. When I logged in again – using FrankieP – it would revert to frankiep.

For a while I changed the settings every time I logged in, in the hopes that one day the issue would be resolved and the change would stick.

I sent an @ reply to Twitter a couple of times asking about it, but no reply.

Thought changing my username to something different and back again might help

Someone saw my question to Twitter and suggested changing my name to something else and then back to FrankieP. That kind of made sense because if Twitter was being confused by the fact that it thought it was me anyway, maybe by changing and then reverting back to the capitalised version it would be a clearer change.

I knew I was taking a risk, but I felt if I acted fast enough my desired username would only be available for a moment or two.

So I changed my username to TheFrankieP, and then went to change it again to FrankieP – but Twitter said that FrankieP was already in use, and so was frankiep.

I checked and frankiep and FrankieP both resolved to my account – which was now officially TheFrankieP.

While I had username frankiep, I think another user was able to register capitalised version FrankieP

At this point I was worried, but I figured that there might be some form of caching or holding pool for recently changed usernames. So I waited, and tried to change my username every so often – always with the same results.

Until about 48 hours later when not only could I not get my username back, but frankiep and FrankieP started resolving to another user. I couldn’t believe it – I assumed at first that Twitter had released the name and someone had just got in before me, but then I noticed the guy had one update – 16 days ago when I still held the username.

My best guess is that someone else was somehow able to register as FrankieP while I was frankiep, but that he found he couldn’t use Twitter because Twitter allowed him to register but then wouldn’t recognise him as I had the other version of the name.

Now unable to get my username back

In the meantime, I’m stuck with a new username I don’t want and can’t get my old username back, worse, someone else has it, due to what would appear to be a weird glitch in the system.

I have submitted a support ticket, but I’m not holding my breath – reports on turnaround times are not good.

If anyone can help, I’d greatly appreciate it.

I’ll leave you with the advice not to mess with your username on Twitter at all, for the time being!

WordPress is a great simple content management system, but when looking at the Google Analytics for a site I implemented entirely in WordPress I noticed that a significant percentage of people were clicking on the link to the page they were already on.

I was concerned about the impact this might be having on visitors to the site – how much confusion was it causing, whether it had a negative impact on the bounce rate, where would the user have gone if they hadn’t tried to go to the page they were on, and so on.

I scoured the web for a solution to remove the link to the current page, but to my amazement found none. I contacted John Blackbourn who developed this plugin for me – which I am now sharing with you.

John Blackbourn came highly recommended by both Conor O’Neill of LouderVoice and Damien Mulley, and I can now also highly recommend him.

I think this simple little plugin will be especially handy to people like me who develop sites entirely in WordPress for small businesses and monitor the Analytics.

Please check out the ‘Remove Link to Current Page’ plugin page for more details.

The articles stress the importance of making as easy as possible for people to digest your content.

There are three articles, and I highly recommend reading them in full.

1. Writing for Conversions – Part 1 of 3: Structure
2. Writing for Conversions, Part 2 of 3 – Tone
3. Writing for Conversions, Part 3 of 3 – Format

If I were to pass on some key points in the articles for writing blog posts they would be:

• Open with your key points
• One idea per paragraph
• Keep pages short - I’d add that for blogging many short posts and some longer posts is a good mix
• Write in fragments or short sentences – don’t worry about grammatical correctness if you have made yourself clear
• Highlight in bold important information-carrying words
• Be clear and concise
• Use bullet lists instead of paragraphs where possible

Do read the full articles for a more in depth understanding of writing for the web.

Starting a new blog can feel like you are writing in a vacuum. And that’s when you are writing, what about the times you have no idea what to write about?

The following is by no means a complete blogging strategy, but rather a way to

• find inspiration for your blog posts
• become more involved with the blogging community

Step 1: Monitor blogs for relevant subjects
You will need:

• Google blog search
• IrishBlogs.ie popular topics (for Irish bloggers)

Set up searches relevant to your field/business in Google blog search – Google blog search has handy links at the bottom of any search you do that allow you to subscribe to RSS feeds or set up email alerts.

Email alerts are good because they serve as reminders to blog, as they are more intrusive than RSS.

Don’t forget to include in your search terms your name and the name of your business & website so you can also see and respond to what others are saying about you or your business.

Check out IrishBlogs.ie popular topics – along the top of the site they show the trending topics, with more information below. Under the heading for each trending topic there are links to the blog posts about the topics. There is an RSS feed available for the popular topics so you can keep up to date with popular topics easily.

If you don’t use an RSS reader, read my article on Google’s easy to use RSS reader.

Step 2: Watch for items of interest to you
Once you are monitoring topics using the above tools, watch for posts on subjects you feel strongly about. The ideal is to find posts where you agree with the blogger, but have your own slant on the topic.

Step 3: Respond and engage!
Write a blog post on the subject and be sure to reference and link to the original post.

“Blogger X wrote recently about Topic Y and made some very good points, my own perspective is that…”

Of course, you can link to a number of different blog posts on the subject matter throughout your blog post, you don’t have to limit it to one.

This technique will raise your own awareness of like minded bloggers out there, while letting them know of your existence. When you link to a blog post a trackback will be sent to that person’s blog letting them know about the link.

The extra tip:
When you’re monitoring blogs, if you find posts that interest you but you don’t have a whole blog post about it in you – leave a comment.

Like the blog posts, this is best done when you have a perspective to share on the subject. Most commenting forms include a field for your website, be sure and include a link to your blog – people will often follow that link to get a better sense of who is behind the comment.

With some excitement about confirmation that paid pro Twitter accounts will be rolled out sometime in the vague future, I got to thinking about what features might be useful.

Right now I personally have no need to pay for increased Twitter functionality but if I was a ‘power user’ there might be additional functionality I would pay for.

Existing third party features for Twitter that could be made ‘official’

There are loads of features that might be useful to power users, but lots of them are handled by various third party tools such as:

• Autofollowing people (like TweetLater)
• Sending automated direct messages (like TweetLater)
• Sending automated updates based on search terms (like TwitterHawk)
• Managing multiple Twitter accounts (like HootSuite)
• Multiple users per account (like HootSuite)

Most of the above features I have no use for, but if I was a power user with a global marketing plan I can see how they could come in handy.

Statistics and analytic tools for Twitter

The main functionality I can see people paying for is statistics, because that kind of data / functionality can only be provided by Twitter. What kind of stats might be useful?

• Number of visits to profile page / individual updates
• Most Retweeted Content
• Most clicked on links & their containing updates
• Search terms used to find updates, referring sites and other standard web stats

Easier maintaining of Twitter followers

A feature I would like to have access to is making a yes/no decision about following people. Right now, I get email notifications about people who follow me. It’s disruptive to check out each one as they come in, so they build up and I do them in batches. But it’s time consuming.

There are sites like Friend or Follow and Twitter Karma which make it easy to see my non reciprocated follows – but they show all of them. Because Twitter offers you the option to follow but no option not to follow, people I have already made a decision about show up in that list.

What I want to see is a list of the non reciprocated people who are following me, by date, that I have not made a decision about yet. With follow yes/no options and an ability on the same page to expand their details to show bio and last 5 updates.

You could also see a list of people you had decided not to follow, and a list of people you follow.

Now imagine an official Twitter tool which did all of the above. Would that be worth paying for? One location for all features, and improved confidence in the tool.

The secret ingredient to maintain Twitter’s integrity

I think the biggest feature on a pro Twitter account is one that hasn’t been figured out yet. A feature which would allow for businesses to market their wares on Twitter without compromising the integrity of Twitter.

If Twitter keeps going the way it is now, with businesses and marketers using auto follows, automated searches, auto updates, auto dm’s and the like described above, we may all find ourselves either swimming in a sea of advertising or aggressively culling our followers back to our closest friends – and even then there are two problems 1) even our nearest and dearest might still be auto marketing and 2) it kind of defeats the purpose of connecting with people on Twitter.

I’ve already been thinking about this on Pat Phelan’s post about Twitter marketing (my comment here).

Look at FaceBook for a moment – it has separated out how users interact with people and businesses. This was a wise decision and allows much greater options for the future of marketing on FaceBook.

What could Twitter implement to protect us from a relentless tide of marketing, but allow businesses to interact with people? It would be great to be heading toward a future on Twitter where regular users continue to use Twitter as is, but businesses sign up for a paid account to gain access to marketing tools.

What about a pro business feature which inserted business updates, marked as such, into the streams of people who’s content has been algorithmically deemed contextually appropriate? The algorithm would also protect from over saturation of marketing stuff. While at the same time getting more ruthless with autofollows & auto messaging of any kind, and possibly frowning on marketing in regular updates with a thumbs up / down system on updates to allow Twitter to monitor for abuse.

Your feature suggestions?

The above idea is only one of, I’m sure, potentially millions of approaches. What do you reckon? Comments welcomed with open arms

What does crowdsourcing design mean?

Sites like 99Designs or CrowdSpring allow you to run design competitions for your work.

You post a brief, and the amount of money you will pay for the winning design. People can submit their answer to your brief and you can offer feedback and redirection within the timeframe of the content before picking the winner.

Usually there is a money back guarantee if you do not get a certain amount of entries – otherwise you must pick a winner.

Crowdsourcing may not be as beneficial as developing a relationship with a designer

Personally, I have a way of working which simply isn’t possible using the usual crowdsourcing systems – I like to get to know the client and their company in order to provide a final design which fits their overall brand. I like to chat over a coffee and get a feel for what the client or company is all about. This kind of interaction and follow up research simply isn’t possible with the crowdsourcing sites.

Most of the good designers I know have a similar approach, very few designers will simply take a brief such as “I need a logo for this site, we sell X” and get to work – the best designs stem from a much fuller understanding of the needs of a client.

Crowdsourcing means you are paying too little for your design

Because design is such a subjective practice, a designer cannot be guaranteed any given entry will win. Therefore someone entering crowdsourcing competitions will have to enter a number of competitions if he expects to make any money. The average award being quite low ($50 – $500 $100 to $600 according to 99designs for example) means that the amount of money they earn for each design they produce is a pittance when you include the competitions they don’t win.

Therefore you must accept that it is unlikely you will get entries from experienced designers who will spend time on the logo coming up with a unique and professional design – it simply isn’t economically viable for a professional.

The old adage if you ‘pay peanuts, you get monkeys’ springs to mind.

To be fair, you might get lucky. There are bound to be some hungry designers starting out on a promising career who will produce stunning work on crowdsourcing sites in order to develop a portfolio of work. However, I have personally seen little evidence of this to date.

Crowdsourcing design is like supporting design sweatshops

I have to smile at the thought of a design sweatshop, and I know it’s not really like a sweatshop – but it’s an interesting analogy and food for thought: One designer took the figure published by 99designs and made the following deduction:

At the time of this writing, $1,226,703 has been awarded across 346,171 entries. Second-grade math teaches us this averages out to $3.54 per entry. [...] you’re doing spec work for third-world prices with no option for copyright retention. [...] At the core, 99design’s business model is as evil as any oil company’s — it relies totally on the ignorance and desperation of its constituents.

Do you know enough about design to pick a winner?

The best way to get design work done is to find a designer who’s stuff you like. Find a designer who’s portfolio fits the kind of work you are looking for. Develop a relationship with the designer and work with them to develop your designs.

A good designer will work with you and explain when your suggestions may not be good for your brand, and why. An entrant in a competition, not having a relationship with you, is more likely to accept your stipulations at face value to get them closer to winning.

because you can’t predict who will enter your competition, or what level of design expertise they have, you are taking a gamble with your money. The website No-Spec makes a good point when it says

it’s a gamble on two levels: first that at least one of the designers comes up with the right solution, and two, that you happen to choose that design.

With a very limited feedback loop, there is little room for even a sound concept to grow to a fully realised design. And without a keen design sense you may not spot the better concepts at early stages.

I know someone who crowdsourced their design and they’re very happy

If you’re a poker player, you will know that you should fold if your holding a seven and a two unsuited. It’s the worst hand you could be dealt. I have played against beginners who didn’t know to fold it and I’ve lost against them. Does that mean I now play seven, two unsuited when I get dealt them? No, because I know that the odds are against me. The possibility is there that I will win, but the odds are against me.

So having said that – yes – I do know of at least two companies who who didn’t fold, er, I mean who crowdsourced their logo and are happy. I’m personallly not too keen on either logo, but hey, there’s a lot of professionally designed logos I don’t like either.

Wait. So I should or shouldn’t crowdsource my design work?

Hell I don’t know. If you’ve read the above and you still think you might be comfortable crowdsourcing it’s your call, but I hope that the above might have helped set your expectations to a more realistic level when it comes to crowdsourcing.

I might even try it myself sometime.

With thanks to Twitter conversations and links from @SabrinaDent, @antonmannering, @curiousmike, @destraynor, @TheLogoFactory, @robinb (if you’re on Twitter it’s worth following all these people) and the following articles as well as the ones linked to in the post above: $50 logo experiment, why you should crowdsource your logo and the creativity of crowds

FaceBook introduced polls you could pay for back in June 2007, but they then disappeared again completely – however there have been some rumblings of a return with reports of FaceBook demoing the polls recently.

As things stand, I think FaceBook polls, were they reintroduced, might be ignored by users, much as FaceBook ads are largely ignored. Filling in a poll is an invasion into the ‘freeness’ of Facebook – a price to be paid in one’s time for someone elses gain.

Would offering a potential reward mean the polls would be seen as further free stuff to be had, rather than a price to pay?

FaceBook Ads seemed like a great idea – you could target your ads specifically to age groups, locations, gender etc, but it turns out they’re not so great after all – click through rates tend to be very poor.

FaceBook ads are not going to be the revenue generator FaceBook had hoped for, they need to find another way to generate revenue from their huge userbase.

Could FaceBook be re-examining polls as a way to generate revenue?

The way it worked before was that one could pay to poll users with a multiple choice question which shows up in their feed when they log in. TechCrunch have a short article explaining more about how FaceBook polls worked when originallly introduced.

Now that the global economy is looking a little worse for wear the ‘freeconomics’ business models will be under a lot more pressure to find that pot of gold under that free rainbow, however when Chris Anderson wrote about free being the new economy he said “the truth is that zero is one market and any other price is another.” It’s known as the penny gap.

Free is the market FaceBook users have become accustomed to and filling in a poll may well turn out to be a price they are not willing to pay.

Whether this type of system would impact on the quality of the data would have to be assessed in some way, but what if you offered a possible reward to fill in the polls? Any user who fills in the poll is entered into a draw. Now you have gone from asking a price of your users to offering them more free stuff.

Rewards could be set by the companies who wish to do market research or could be handled by FaceBook on a larger scale where not every individual poll has a prize but rather groups of polls, or polls within a certain timeframe.

What do you think? Would you complete a poll in your FaceBook feed? Would you complete one if you might win something?

This post has been updated to fix inaccuracies caused by being a little trigger happy with the publish button and not paying attention to dates on articles when researching! The rumours of FaceBook polls returning may have been premature in any case, but I’m glad they got me thinking about this anyway