May 2004
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The Clearing
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1 min read
Once in a while the Monopoly game of life tosses us Second Prize in a Beauty Contest card. Last night, courtesy of the nice people at the New Yorker and Johnny Walker, I saw a preview of the film The Clearing with Robert Redford, Willem Dafoe and Helen Mirren. The plot was thriller, but the…
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CMS Playground
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1 min read
I used to say CMS user interfaces were developing slowly because, like intranets, they were all behind the firewall. But I’m wrong, opensourceCMS has many CMS packages installed for you to try out and learn from. An excellent resource.
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Internet Appliance
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1 min read
On Matt’s blog I found a place to raise my freak Internet appliance flag, ‘If we look at what people actually use PCs for, there’s a bell curve that includes email, web, digital photos, and a couple other things. Why not spend $299 for that? ‘. He points me to the Emailer plus: emailing and…
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Service and Work
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1 min read
More notes from Managing the Professional Service Firm… He points out that the work is only part of the consultant’s service. We are also judged on our responsiveness, attitude, manner, etc. When the quality of the work product is difficult to measure (as with consulting advice), the service aspect is actually more important than the…
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Conversational Design
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2 min read
Peterme-the-guru created a drum to beat, ‘Through my work, what I’ve observed is that the web is all about managing expectations . Setting expectations, and then fulfilling them. That’s it. You do that right, and you’re golden. The term I have right now for dealing with this is Explicit Design’ An excellent drum, one that…
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Practice Development Activities
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1 min read
More notes from Managing the Professional Service Firm… He identifies 3 vital categories of practice development (i.e. marketing) activities and what percentage of time to spend on each: Broadcasting (writing papers) – 10% Courting (forming a client relationship) – 25-40% Superpleasing (Going beyond satisfaction to delight) – 10-15% Nurturing (Spending extra, non-billable time to understand…
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The cost of software
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1 min read
Interesting that a price policy in something as relatively low cost as blog software has spurred such good thinking about price policies. Mark Pilgram gives us the long-term view: ‘In the long run, the utility of all non-Free software approaches zero. All non-Free software is a dead end… It’s not about money; it’s about freedom.‘…
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Irony
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1 min read
Irony was cited as a trait of my generation, but it seems even stronger in the upcoming generation, increasingly reality-show self-aware. Is this a trend, growing irony over time? Douglas Coupland, author of Gen X, later said, ‘When you’re younger, you think a little irony is all you need. You think it’ll get you to…
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Profitability vs. Health
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1 min read
More notes from Managing the Professional Service Firm… Rather than focusing on chargability and realization reports, look at profits per partner. For each activity the firm strives to improve (e.g. delagate better, develop higher value services) examine how each contributes to both short-term profitability and long-term health. These activities, in order of importance to health,…
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A Firm’s Mix of Consultants and Projects
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1 min read
As mentioned last week, I’m reading David H. Maister’s Managing the Professional Service Firm, and it’s very very very good. I’ll post some summaries here, though it’s almost a sin to summarize it as his writing is already clear and concise. Staff falls in 3 basic levels: Partner, Manager, and Consultant. He identifies 3 main…
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Fast Company design issue
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1 min read
The current issue of Fast Company is all about design. It’s mostly them confirming that yes, design is important, but also putting a nice human perspective on it by focusing on design leaders. I discovered Angela Shen-Hsieh’s gorgeous data visualizations, she has a beautiful/fascinating ppt on the AIGA site.
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Blog software mayhem
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1 min read
My MT Alternatives post back on May 6 turns out to be prescient, with Movable Type upping their prices and competitors finally coming out of the wood work. Regarding MT’s prices, mostly I’m disappointed in the we-want-everything-for-free attitude of the complainers (heard before when Blogger had load and security issues), I thought that went away…
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Play sound!
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1 min read
So I’ve got this big, expensive computing machine under my desk that’s capable of generating some serious music, and yet out of the box it’s rather difficult to get it to play anything at all. Sometimes all I need is the A below middle C to tune my guitar, ya know? I found Audacity which…
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Ungoogled
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1 min read
I’m trying to forumulate my rationale to myself of why I don’t want a piece of the Google IPO. It has something to do with 1) IPOs are bad for companies in general, 2) Google has explicitly warned it won’t try to make returns in the short term. Given that Google took the search crown…
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Recent NBS features
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1 min read
In case you’re only reading the feed: Backslider slides through your recently visited web pages, the Wall St. Journal discovers IA, summaries of an MBA journal on design, and the classic Bell telephone meets the mobile.