“The lens of our attention”

Another wonderful post by Seth Godin about perspective. I love his idea of the “lens of our attention”. Such an awesome way of visualising it that appeals to me as a photographer.

Seth Godin has another wonderful post about attention and perspective today. It is titled “Depth of field” and he writes about something which, I think, we all struggle with in varying degrees:

We have a choice about where to aim the lens of our attention. We can relive past injustices, settle old grudges and nurse festering sores. We can imagine failure, build up its potential for destruction, calculate its odds. Or, we can imagine the generous outcomes we’re working on, feel gratitude for those that got us here and revel in the possibilities of what’s next.

Like most of his posts, it isn’t a long one and I’d love to quote the whole thing but you really should just visit his blog and read the whole post. Lots of gems in this one and very relevant for me, in particular.

Image credit: PixaBay

Those crazy, early months as a learner Israeli

Bibi is another learner Israeli who arrived here about 3 months ago. She is blogging about her experiences and, when I read her latest post, it reminds me what we experienced a few months ago (and still do).

Bibi Canes is another learner Israeli who arrived in Israel with her family just 3 months ago. She wrote a post about some of her experiences and, reading them, they remind me of much of what we went through a short time ago (and still do, to a degree).

It’s all about that Thyme

I wrote a comment on the post and thought I’d share the comment here too.

It definitely takes a bit of getting used to. I still think of the weekends as being 2 days. Friday feels like my old Saturday although there is usually a lot more cleaning involved before or after we schlep to do the weekend shopping. In a way it is great that the kids are at school on Friday mornings because it means we have a couple hours to do what we need to do, uninterrupted. Sometimes we even get to spend some time together!

We don’t have a car so Saturdays are forced downtime with the family. It’s usually a good break even though there is often a lot of stuff the kids want help with. Still, that part is pretty much the same as back in South Africa except we wound up driving all over when we could have relaxed at home more.

I definitely miss Woolies meat but my genius wife has managed to figure out which local meat is pretty good. My brother-in-law even found relatively cheap meat that tasted great, albeit after cooking for 3 hours. It isn’t the same but I am ok with what we exchanged Woolies meat for – a very different life. We work harder here, usually for less of the material stuff but, on balance, it’s a fair trade for what we gained living here.

You can also follow Bibi on Facebook:

 

What happens after lead generation?

I don’t usually write about lead generation but this is a great resource and I really wanted to share it. The question is what happens after you generate that lead? What do you do?

I’m very much in lead generation mode lately. It is a major theme for our department (the marketing department, of course!) and for me in particular.

My primary goal this next quarter is to optimise our company blog to generate more leads for our sales team. It is a terrific challenge for me to learn more about how to write content that converts more effectively and I’m pretty excited about expanding my skill set even further.

I noticed a great Q&A article on Inbound.org which asks an important question:

We talk so much about generating leads, but there’s a less sexy topic that rarely gets discussed – what happens after you get a new lead?

The first response by Josh Garofalo is just fantastic and when I started reading it I knew I had to share it, even though it isn’t my usual material on this blog. I noticed the link on Facebook. You can also link directly to the post on Inbound.org.

 

IFTTT v Pinboard – BFFs again

What began as IFTTT v Pinboard seems to have transitioned to “IFTTT and Pinboard” as the two services reached some sort of agreement last week to preserve some level of integration between the two services and keep Pinboard connected to IFTTT beyond the initial transition deadline.

After a little drama and consternation, it looks like the IFTTT people and the Pinboard person have reached some sort of agreement on the way forward. There aren’t many details but IFTTT sent out an email on Thursday (31 March) which largely apologised for mistakes made, lack of clarity about certain aspects of the new platform and confusion about the terms and conditions.

Hello Pinboard Customers,

We’ve made mistakes over the past few days both in communication and judgment. I’d like to apologize for those mistakes and attempt to explain our intentions. I also pledge to do everything we can to keep Pinboard on IFTTT.

IFTTT gives people confidence that the services they love will work together. There are more services in the world than IFTTT can possibly integrate and maintain alone. We are working on a developer platform that solves this by enabling service owners to build and maintain their integration for the benefit of their customers.

The vast majority of Channels on IFTTT are now built on that developer platform by the services themselves. We made a mistake in asking Pinboard to migrate without fully explaining the benefits of our developer platform. It’s our responsibility to prove that value before asking Pinboard to take ownership of their Channel. We hope to share more on the value of our platform soon.

I also want to address Pinboard’s concerns with our Developer Terms of Service. These terms were specific to our platform while in private beta and were intended to give us the flexibility to evolve our platform in close partnership with early developers. We’ve always planned to update and clarify those terms ahead of opening our platform and we are doing so now. We are specifically changing or removing areas around competing with IFTTT, patents, compatibility and content ownership. The language around content ownership is especially confusing, so I’d like to be very clear on this: as a user of IFTTT you own your content.

I truly appreciate all of your feedback, concerns and patience. Helping services work together is what IFTTT does. We respect and appreciate the open web. This very openness has been instrumental in enabling us to build IFTTT and we fully intend to pay it forward.

Linden Tibbets
CEO, IFTTT

There were certainly mistakes made although I’m not so sure about the other stuff. That said, this is certainly a positive development and Pinboard’s Maciej Cegłowski seems to agree:

It’s not clear how much longer Pinboard will remain connected to IFTTT. I imagine the parties came to some sort of agreement about modifications to IFTTT’s terms and conditions and requirements for integrating Pinboard into the new IFTTT platform. The approach for now seems to be a “wait and see” approach but it’s a step in a better direction.

With all that, we can probably return to our regularly scheduled programming or work and carry on. As for my complaints about Cegłowski’s apparent lack of empathy, his sarcasm is growing on me.

Yup.

If you missed the saga, you can catch up here:

Part 1:

IFTTT v Pinboard

Part 2:

IFTTT v Pinboard Redux – Contracts and Condescension

Image credit: Pixabay

Insanity or a new model?

Maybe your preferred model doesn’t work anymore and, instead of insisting on using it and expecting a different outcome, you should adopt a new model?

I just read this in Seth Godin’s post titled “Time for a new model?”:

The thing is, when your model doesn’t match reality (when you have trouble predicting how your investments will do, whether a sales call will resonate, whether a presentation will work, whether a new hire will work out) it’s tempting to blame reality.

What is that old adage about insanity and doing the same thing over and over?

You’re miserable because you’re not writing

If you are a writer you need to write. If you are miserable, you are probably not writing and the only solution is to return to your writing and just write something.

Perhaps you are miserable because you’re not writing? Stacey experienced that and really nails what it is like to be a writer sometimes in her post titled “All I’ve ever wanted to do with my life is write”.

All I’ve ever wanted to do with my life…

She expresses how I have felt when I was not writing as much as I would have liked to or when I wasn’t writing the stuff that I needed to write.

I went through a phase last year when the work I was doing was pretty repetitive and not in the least bit challenging. It felt a lot like this:

I’m a writer who doesn’t have the time to write anymore.It makes me miserable, and frustrated and a bit lost. My North Star has winked out.

One of my conclusions about that time turned out to be one of the reasons I started writing much more for myself here and is nicely expressed by Stacey’s advice to herself:

You’re miserable because you’re not writing anymore, Stacey. Write more, dammit.

When I feel adrift, I usually turn to writing because it unblocks the dam of emotion that has built up. It’s a lot like unblocking a drain that you’ve neglected for too long.

At first it is a struggle just to dig out enough muck to reach the blockage itself. Then, when you dig some more, you see all the gunk ooze through and it isn’t pretty. Soon enough, though, that all gives way to a wonderful flow that you don’t want to stop so you keep writing to keep the pipes clear and fresh water flowing.

A side note about “content marketing”

Writing isn’t just mechanically putting some text on a page, at least not for me. It is very much a creative process. I sometimes encounter an attitude about content marketing that disturbs me. It is this idea that you can just pick a topic, throw some words on a page and give it a list-based title and call that “content”.

Well, sure, you can do that and many “content marketers” do that all the time but the result is hollow and formulaic text that may as well be created by a machine (and, one day soon, will be).

As important as it is to write with a voice appropriate to what you are trying to achieve, I don’t think you can write well if you don’t infuse that writing with a little of your voice, your perspective on the world and your passion for writing.

This is how I see the difference between boilerplate marketing “content” and writing that adds something meaningful to whatever I am reading or for and, perhaps, a response to this question:

Do fewer people trust bloggers?

Image credit: Pixabay

Do fewer people trust bloggers?

Do fewer people trust bloggers the more people take to the Web to publish their thoughts and use their newfound publishing platforms to pitch their products, services and talents?

Om Malik asked why fewer people trust bloggers that has been bugging me lately:

That question made me wonder: how much of our social media has become marketing that people actually question something for which you profess your love. I admit, sometimes I have asked myself — so what is that guy selling? I read Medium posts, and one in three are selling something. They are a variation of – my startup flamed, I am amazing, hire me as a consultant. Or look at how amazing my growth hacking idea was for me, so hire me. The “Medium post as a resume replacement” is part of the larger trend – social media as a marketing platform. It isn’t social when you have to question the motives behind “social objects” be shares.

I write for myself and I am employed as a marketing writer so I spend my day moving from one side to the other; between focusing on writing that feels right to me and then writing stuff that promotes my employer and its products.

There are days when the stuff I write as part of my day job is not the sort of thing I’d publish here and that is where the difference between being a blogger/writer and a professional marketing writer. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing. When I write marketing text, my goal is to speak in my employer’s voice. When I write for myself, I use my voice. They don’t have to be the same and they usually aren’t.

At the same time, it should be clear from the context when I am writing with which voice but with so much emphasis on writing to increase exposure and attract more attention; writing just for the sake of expressing yourself often takes a back seat.

This blog is my space and I write about the things I am interested in. I don’t write for some form of remuneration, for the most part. When I am compensated for something I write here (and I haven’t been for several years) I am careful to disclose that so you can decide for yourself how much credence to give what I write.

As Malik pointed out, not everyone makes those disclosures so it becomes difficult to draw a distinction between self-expression and self-promotion. This just leads to more cynicism. I wonder, is this growing cynicism diminishing how much people trust bloggers, generally speaking? Is it something most people wonder about or is it generally accepted that most bloggers are pitching for someone or something?

Read Om Malik’s post titled “Social media is making us all skeptics & that’s not good”.

Social media is making us all skeptics & that’s not good 

Image credit: Pixabay

IFTTT v Pinboard Redux – Contracts and Condescension

When I wrote about the IFTTT v Pinboard standoff yesterday, I didn’t spend much time on the contract stuff in my article. Here are a few more thoughts about just how objectionable those contract clauses are and why I believe we are the ones caught in the middle of this mess.

When I wrote about the IFTTT v Pinboard standoff yesterday, I didn’t spend much time on the contract stuff in my article beyond this comment:

I would also have reservations about the contract they want developers to agree to as part of their transition to the new platform. Requiring developers to agree to the sorts of terms Cegłowski quote seems pretty unreasonable given what the clauses would seem to be saying.

I read through the contract terms that Cegłowski quoted. You can only really assess a contract effectively as a whole and while he quoted contract clauses in isolation, you can see why they are a concern.

IFTTT’s Contract land grab

These clauses are a sort of legal land grab. They may not have been intended that way by IFTTT (I tend to blame the lawyers for this sort of approach) but the effect of the clauses is to claim developers’ code created to integrate with IFTTT’s new platform for IFTTT with little credit to the developers. You can see that in clauses 3 (Ownership) and 12 (Patent License) in particular.

He also makes a good point about clause 11 which does, indeed, seem to have the effect of requiring him to “work for them, for free, on demand”:

  1. Compatibility. Each Licensee Channel must maintain 100% compatibility with the Developer Tool and the Service including changes provided to you by IFTTT, which shall be implemented in each Channel promptly thereafter.

I accept that IFTTT should be entitled to update its platform and, as a business which has profit generation as one of its primary responsibilities, perhaps even using a private API. Without knowing much about how these things work from a development perspective, requiring that developers bind themselves to a closed development environment with onerous demands seems pretty unreasonable. That said, this explanation makes some sense to me:

It certainly isn’t a good way to maintain constructive relationships with the many developers who help make IFTTT for its users by linking their services to IFTTT.

Who is really caught in the middle?

Shawn Roos made an interesting comment yesterday. I don’t agree with him, though. I think our tendency to leap to the defence of the lone developer facing up to the bigger corporation can skew our perspectives. For what it’s worth, I lean more towards supporting Cegłowski on this one.

At the same time, I don’t particularly appreciate his dismissive attitude towards the situation his customers, like me, find ourselves in but we don’t pay him for charm. We pay him to maintain and improve his bookmarking service. If he wants to behave in a certain way, well that is his choice even if being a little more empathetic could improve his relationship with his users and strengthen our support.

At the same time, while he is certainly affected by IFTTT’s new stance, Cegłowski is not the one caught in the middle here, we are. We are in the middle of this dispute because we made the decision to use both services and the positions both providers have taken means that we have to find alternative workflows to fill the functionality gaps the rift has caused.

If IFTTT vanished off the Web altogether, Pinboard would continue doing what it does now and would have value because of what it does. The same can be said for IFTTT. Changes to either service impact us users who have chosen to use the services together and when these sorts of services clash (the reasons don’t matter), we are impacted in varying degrees.

It’s a little like the citizens of Metropolis being caught up in the fallout of the battle between Superman and General Zod that we saw more of in the introduction to Batman v Superman. Granted, not nearly as devastating but you get the idea.

I was hoping this whole thing would be resolved in some way but it looks like that won’t happen. In my case that isn’t a catastrophe. I had some workflows running which automated a few tasks I wanted to run and I’m sure I can find another way to do them. It is just unfortunate that I need to and neither IFTTT or Pinboard seem to be particularly concerned about the effect on their users.

Anyway, moving along …

Image credit: Tug of War by Eva Funderburgh, licensed CC BY-NC 2.0