I like writing comments right onto the screen of a webpage. This is the future of the internet. I want a browser where i can draw right onto the screen, and then take a screenshot and post it to any social media site.
Right now it takes many leaps to write on a webpage.
- Screenshot the webpage.
- Open the screenshot in CreatePDF app.
- Convert the image to jpg.
- Go the library in CreatePDF.
- Select and send the image to Notability.
- Open Notability
- Select the image in Notability
- Draw on the screen
- Export as PDF to email.
- Open email app
- Open email
- Download PDF
- Convert PDF to jpg
- Open pictures app
- Select camera roll album
- Select image
- Send image to social media.
That’s crazy. I want to be in my browser, select “draw on screen.” Draw. Crop. Then post to social media. All in the browser.Most people don’t spend the time reading the text caption underneath the photo. It’s a lot easier to have the caption right inside the photo. That way, when people share the photo, the original caption always travels with it. And it makes for a nice tidy, fun, package.You immediately get the point when the text is written on the photo/webpage.
Plus, the handwriting gives a personal touch. This is the future of the internet.
What could the bookstore of the future look like?
Bethanne Patrick, Executive Editor of Book Riot, asked this question on her blog post, “The Bookstore of the Future, Installment One: What Would Don Draper Handsell?” (hat-tip to @dbsalk for tweeting a link to this post.)
I’d love to see specific niche-by-topic bookstores. Like a bookstore for design books. Heck, it would be cool to have it be a library. I would be willing to pay, say, a dollar to rent a book for a month… BUT under the premise that I could write marginalia in the margins of the book. That is what would be the differentiating factor. The total community experience.
- The bookstore/library would be about one topic area, thus it would be a great place to meet people of like mind.
- The books would have members notes written in the margins. This would help to share more ideas and interaction. Each time someone writes notes in the margin, it is suggested that you use a different color ink. (or in e-books, your notes would just be identified by your username)
Amazon is really missing the boat on:
- How people like to meet around books.
- How people like to share books that have their notes in them. Right now it’s darn near impossible to read someone else’s notes in a kindle-version book.
What should the bookstore of the future have?
One of the reasons why I don’t host this blog on blogger is that blogger makes it too hard to comment.
At first glance their commenting form looks like any other.
- You type in your comment.
- You get to pick what profile you are commenting as (Google, Livejournal, WordPress, Typepad, AIM, openID, Name/URL)
- You click “Publish”
Seems like that’s all there’s to it, right? Publish means publish. It’s done. But then you get to another screen with the same comment form, but now with a captcha. I feel as though my comment should have already been posted. But now you have to continue with the next step - Fill out the captcha.
Often times the captcha part will fall below the fold of my browser, so I don’t even know I have to fill it out.
It makes you wonder how many blogger comments are lost because people leave the page at that 4th step.
One of the readers of this blog brought an interesting comment that sharing with like-minded people should be enough. No explanation is necessary for why we share particular articles. The headline should stand for itself. I can see an argument for that. It’s like gift-giving. Often at birthdays we give gifts and there doesn’t always have to be an explicit reason why we picked a certain gift. Andreamv (the aforementioned reader) said, “As I just heard in a talk yesterday, what we share is how we define ourselves online.”
My response:
Good points, yes what we share is how we define ourselves online. But I would take that to another level and say how we share is how define ourselves online.
This reminds me of something the president of a company I interned for said in the late 90s. People would leave printouts of articles on his chair. A nice gesture, certainly. But he found himself with so much to read, I wanted to know why he should read certain articles. So he addressed the staff and asked people to put a sentence or two explaining why that article was worthwhile. I believe the same thing holds to this day. While I appreciate people who share links, there’s just so many links, I would like to understand why some links in particular are worth reading. Perhaps the headline can explain why. But then sometimes I wonder if we have gotten to soo deep into consuming, that we have lost our way in processing what we consume to the point that we can’t explain why something is significant.
Do you think it’s good to leave a reason why you are sharing a particular article? Or is it enough to simply just give the link?
Do you have too many interests? Is your blog all over the place?
Mine is. It’s hard to promote my spudart blog when I cover such a wide random range of topics. Same thing with Google Plus. I use Google Plus to share articles. But those articles are so random.
But now I’m started to understand how Google Plus can work. I’m putting all my posts into certain circles, which before, seemed like a waste of time. But at some point when I get enough posts put into each circle, I’m gonna start following a ton of people that are related to each of those circles. So i’m making posts into my art circle, and then i’ll follow a bunch of art people. The art people will see my Google Plus and think, “oh this guy posts about art. Cool. I’ll follow him.”
Now since i use Google Plus for posting all my comments about articles I read, i’m making more and more circles. Urban planning, chicago sports, beverages, social media. Eventually I’ll follow all sorts of people according to those topic areas. The urban planning people will only see my urban planning posts. The Chicago sports people will only see my posts on Chicago sports.
People won’t see me as some big mixed-up, unfocused person. They’ll see specific niche content for what they are interested in. For 200 people who do know and like me as an unfocused person, they can still see all my posts, because whenever I make a post, I make it to two circles: “all untargeted” (my 200 friends) and whichever circle fits the focus.
It would be nice if people could subscribe to specific circles. But for now, that isn’t possible with anything. I’m still waiting for the day for the service to arrive to be a “pinterest for articles.” For now you can add me to your Google+ circles.
My brother Erik on Disney:
I was really impressed with how every single Disney worker was incredibly kind. From the waiters to the street sweepers to the whatever else job there is-ers. And it wasn’t a “I’m being nice because i have to be nice” attitude. They seemed genuinely nice.
People really, really like Disney, so i think the workers enjoy being a part of disney
Erik makes some good points. It’s kinda like the Apple store. Do they have Disney geniuses that work at a Disney genius bar? When a toy of yours breaks? Or if you have a trivia question about a Disney feature?
When you think about it, that’s part of Apple’s mystique. They have people who work there that are called geniuses, because they love the product so much, that they are walking evangelicals for the product. And it makes people want to aspire to be as smart about Apple as these geniuses. They aren’t just Best Buy slackers. These are lovers of the product.
Having geniuses does several things for Apple:
1) Helping people.
People like being helped when they have a problem. Anytime a real human can stand beside you in person, that’s huge.
2) Examples of fans.
These geniuses show that not only can you be a fan, but you can be an überfan. It’s like there is an official level that one can attain. Imagine if the Chicago Cubs had an official überfan status.
3) Example of knowledge to gain.
By raising up those who have superior knowledge of your product, it encourages others to gain this knoweledge.
Idea:
Wrigley Field should have a Genius bar where people can come up and ask the geniuses questions about the Cubs. Either about the current team or about the players in the past. It would strike up good conversations. People would try to stump the geniuses.
If you, a regular fan, can stump the Cubs Genius, then that kinda makes yourself a Genius. You have achieved semi-über fan status!
Other examples of genius bars:
Comic book stores. Man. If you own a comic book shop, that automatically makes you a comic book genius. Everytime you walk into a comic book store, it’s like walking up to the Genius bar at the Apple store.
In addition to the 11 blogs on my reading list, I am looking for more blogs about content marketing and syndication. Thanks to junta42 for listing 84 blogs about marketing. I took the top nine blogs whose focus is on content marketing and added them to my Google Reader. Perhaps these will make it into my regular reading folder.
- Post advertising
- WebInkNow: Marketing and leadership strategies
- Marketing Interactions
- Sparksheet: Good ideas about content, media and marketing
- Idealaunch
- Straight Talk with Nigel Hollis
- Writing on the Web with Dr. Patsi Krakoff, The Blog Squad: How to use content marketing to get found, get known, get clients
- Big Star Copywriting
- Forrester Blogs: Content Creation
Does anyone read any of these blogs? Or do you have a suggestion for blogs about content marketing and/or syndication? Please share in the comments. Thanks!
With the speed of social media, is there much of a need for an archive? To get eyeballs, it’s all about getting people to tweet, pin, tumbl, stumble your work in matter of a day or even just in hours. You can’t even access your tweets older than a year.
Which is kinda funny, cuz I come from the days back in the early 00s when your blog content got better google rankings the more it was around. Of course, that’s now ten years ago. Now everything is rightfully centered around social and real people.
But what about archives? Does everything have to be in the moment? Some good news from Facebook’s timeline. It does remind us of our past. Even though it kinda creeps people out, because they want that stuff to remain in the past. There is value to having an archive of your writing instead of skittering to and fro. Forgetting our past gives us no place in the present.
Where are your friends? Check foursquare. Check facebook places. Check for location-based tweets. Check instagram. Yipes! That’s a lot of places to check! Banjo the new iPhone app automatically checks all those services and notifies you when a friend is nearby. Pretty neat.
It’s like banjo takes all the location-based services and syndicates that information into one service.
Only thing is that if you are friends with lost of people, then you’ll get lots of notifications. Here’s a letter I sent to Banjo:
I would like to request that I can make lists in banjo. I have many friends on foursquare and other services where I simply do not care to get iOS notifications. Getting all these iOS notifications is so annoying that it makes me want to turn off Banjo.
But you have a great service. Please consider my suggestion to make your service much more helpful. Please allow us to create lists of people we only want to get notifications of their location. I imagine most of your users are like me and we get notification fatigue from your app. Implementing a list feature would make your good product into a great one.
Just as newspaper editors have to pick which content to run in their newspaper, users of Banjo should be able to pick which friends they want to get notifications from Banjo.
If anyone has tried Banjo, please leave your thoughts in the comments. Thanks!
With all the overload that people have now, we are going to find that other services need to do two things:
1) Pick the best
Force people who upload many items to pick the best item out of the many items they post. An example is flickr. Most people don’t want to have to scroll through 20 photos of someone’s photo walk. But I’ll certainly look at what that person considers the best photo. It’s almost like determining the cover of the album for those photos.
The only problem is when someone posts many items over the course of the day. Say, on Facebook when you have a friend who will post 10 news stories throughout the day. How do you force that person to pick the best item? I don’t know. I just know that there needs to be some sort of importance/attention scale that the uploader needs to give to their content.
Facebook kinda determines the best posts a person makes by how many comments/likes it gets, but that’s after the fact. It would be good to determine the importance right at the upload/posting.
Instagram is the model for how to do this. For some reason, the way people use it is that they only upload one photo every few hours. Most people probably realize that if you upload more than one photo at a time, you are being annoying. People like seeing the best of a particular moment.
2) Use categories
Force people who upload content to categorize it. There’s certain types of posts that people make that I have no interest in. But I don’t want to unsubscribe from that person entirely. If people categorized their posts, then I could follow exactly what I want to follow. Pinterest is the model for how to do this.
Summary
With more and more items being posted online, I need to know A) What’s important and B) what falls into my interest areas. No more of this scattered noise all over the place. I want what’s best relevant to me.
