Professor of Practice of Behavioral Economics
As I highlighted in a prior post, 21Publish, a niche provider of blog software for turnkey blogging communities, has launched a new pricing model. The pricing model supports 100 free users with 2MBs of space for each user. A free model should be quite attractive for non-profits, alumni groups, ad-hoc organizations, and the like.
Disclosure: I am a consultant to 21Publish.
Update (4/21/05): Torsten Jacobi’s post reminds to link to some blogs developed using the 21Publish platform:
An increased amount of attention has been brought back to
the decision-making field of research with the release of Malcolm Gladwell’s book,
“Blink”. Gladwell’s book focuses on the power of the subconscious and tacit
knowledge in decision-making processes (while conscious). The book is available here at the bookstore at the business school at INSEAD, and his other book, "The Tipping Point" is part of the reading material for one of the courses on organizations (similar to how positioned at the University of Chicago business school to my understanding).
Completing the "Blink" book made me remember a book I read many
years ago on dream interpretation (note Gladwell’s book did not cover deep sleep dreaming, daydreaming, nor spontaneous thoughts that appear during the day). A key motivator for the book was this … wouldn’t it be powerful if one could gain additional benefits
from the activity that we spend one-third of our lives doing, i.e., sleeping?
The book was not Freud-style dream interpretation, where
Freud advocates (to my understanding) literal
interpretation of dreams. Instead, the book I read offers up the notion to the
effect of that each person has their own
data dictionary – dreams are a way of the subconscious communicating with
the conscious mind using images. The meaning of images in a dream (which are frequently
severely exaggerated) can best be understood by reflecting upon the dream as a
whole and the feelings the dream imparts and then determining what feels right
and comfortable as an explanation.
As an example, a woman described a dream where she was
murdering her husband by bludgeoning him over the head with a vacuum cleaner.
Also noteworthy was the fact that the husband appeared as an animal in the
dream – specifically a pig.
Freud might argue the dream literally – that the woman was
at risk of murdering her husband. Reminds me of the Tom Cruise movie, “Minority
Report”.
The book I read offered a different explanation. The
exaggerated nature of the dream was simply an artifact of dreams trying to
communicate with us. Here, the woman had some hard feelings toward her husband
because she felt he was restricting her in the home. The vacuum cleaner
represented “domesticity,” and the pig reflected feelings towards the husband
as a “chauvinist pig”. Murdering only meant that there were strong feelings
that the woman and husband should try to resolve (before things got out of hand).
When working with the executive team at my prior employer to
bring in a corporate venture capital round, I recall many tense discussions
surrounding negotiating terms for the new investor class with respect to angel
investors. I would dream about some of the issues during my sleep, and I would
wake up with the tenuous items popping into my head. Sometimes these cues would
trigger me to go back and talk with an angel investor or founder on specific
points. At other times, dreams simply reflected anxiety or feelings of
happiness as to how a client project for me was going. Much like a subconscious
reminder that pops into one’s head during the day that you should call someone
you haven’t talked to in awhile, pursue someone for a job opportunity or
project, etc., I would sometimes find subconscious cues important to
prioritizing personal action items, raising my sensitivity to other parties, and
recognizing my own feelings better.
I finally got around to completing Hugh Hewitt’s book,
“Blog”. I can’t say that I recommend this book for people looking to understand
business blogging or blogging at a practitioner-level. That said, Hugh does a very nice job of both
highlighting the legitimization of the blog in the context of specific
political events and detailing specific blog and mainstream media events around
the “fall” of Senator Trent Lott, stumblings of presidential candidate John
Kerry, and flurry surrounding the Dan Rather/CBS/Bush National Guard forged
documents.
A couple of interesting things the book touches on:
To be frank, I don’t follow political blogs that closely,
and I haven’t followed the rise of talk radio. Perhaps as a consequence, I
don’t follow Hugh Hewitt that closely. I am not sure if Hugh is center right or
far right. He characterizes himself as center right. That said, some of the
accounts in his book strike me as a bit one-sided. Perhaps not nauseating
one-sideness like
Fahrenheit 9/11, but you may need to look past some of Hugh’s zeal to get through
this book if you are not a Republican.
Om Malik is blogging about Wists, a visual bookmarking service and a potential competitor to del.icio.us. In my prior post that commented on the del.icio.us venture investment, this what I was referring to in terms of del.icio.us investors getting another look sometime down the road and seeing what other industry markers play out (e.g., what innovations occur, who enters the space). In Fred Wilson’s recent post, Fred does hint that the user base for del.icio.us is very large. What the full range of competitive advantages will be (and how strong barriers will be) is yet to be seen.
I’m a little later than the crowd to comment on Fred
Wilson’s blog post on his firm’s recent investment in del.icio.us, but I have
to say that his commentary (on at least one particular point) struck me as
atypical of what I have seen taught in business schools with respect to venture
investing. Not to say this is bad for either the b-schools or the investment – just noteworthy to mention the variance.
At risk of disservice to more extensive “venture capital”
checklists in evaluating deals, an extremely simplistic model of evaluating an
opportunity involves looking at three things:
Yet Fred’s comment indicates something to the effect that
“we’re not sure what the business model is yet, but at this phase we haven’t risked
a lot of money to do the deal”.
On the surface, Fred seems like both a smart guy and honest
guy, so it is probably reasonable to take his words at face value. I haven’t
read through other people’s commentaries yet, but some other potential
hypotheses (not mutually exclusive) for why the investment could diverge from
venture capital investing a la business school frameworks:
What I will say about the del.icio.us deal, is that some of
the investors are also actual end users of the product. I see this as having a
lot of positive effects on both how the deal is evaluated and on how the
product may evolve in the future. Congrats to the del.icio.us team and the
investors. If the investment doesn’t pan out, at least there is a cool product.
Perhaps a Warren Buffet model of investing in a different genre.
Note: Those unfamiliar with del.icio.us can view a prior post of mine here that gathers some screencast info, screenshots, etc.
There are a number of influential bloggers out there saying that blogging by cartoon characters is lame and a waste of time. See here and here, plus trace through some of the links and comments for a general feel. As examples of cartoon characters blogging, here are links to GEICO’s Gecko blog and Captain Morgan’s blog. What triggered my return visit to the subject of cartoon character blogging was that John Nardini was nice enough to send me a link last week to his new Moosetopia blog associated with Moosetracks ice cream.
My take on this: Too early to tell whether cartoon character blogs (as a general market) will work.
At one point in time, we said that the security in Netscape browsers couldn’t get hacked. Too many key combinations to try in our lifetime, etc., etc. Then (perhaps not getting the specifics right) some 17-year old figures out how to hack the security in a matter of minutes.
Someone says it can’t be done. That just challenges the world to find the right mix.
The right mix may lie in:
We allow authors and bloggers to use pseudo names all the time. While cartoon character blogging is clearly not the same thing, there is the added benefit of near-infinite creativity.
All said, I am all for companies that do some experimenting with cartoon character blogging. I think it’s great for guy’s like John to try to pave the way for the rest to learn what works and what doesn’t. There’s not enough data points and posts out there to call this one yet.
Update (4/18/05): Spelling correction on "Jeckl". Should be "Jekyll". My favorite drummer is Dave Weckl, and I made a subliminal spelling mistake.
The following has been cross-posted at The CIO Weblog.
I’ve been catching up on my marketing reading over the past few weeks, and what’s great about some of the material is the use of storytelling. In fact, storytelling and the use of analogies are a great thing to use not only in marketing but also in areas like IT and general management. Storytelling can be used to get people motivated and on the bandwagon.
A Computerworld interview with Harvard Business School’s Professor Jan Rivkin, captures an excellent condition where analogies and storytelling work in the IT area:
Why is analogical reasoning so useful in a field like IT?
Analogies are most powerful in settings where there’s not enough
clarity to use deductive reasoning nor so much ambiguity that you have
to go for trial and error. Many pockets of IT have this middle ground
that’s familiar enough to make links to more familiar settings but not
clear enough to identify cause and effect. In that middle ground,
analogies may be the only options we’ve got.
What I like about the Computerworld article, however, is that it also explicitly touches on some aspects of organizational behavior (OB) and decision making. The OB field is something that I am particularly sensitive to and is something that is not covered by all business schools as a course in of itself. Here are examples of two OB biases addressed in the article (brackets added by me to clarify original text snipped out of context):
[A] potential problem [with using analogies] is the anchoring effect. Can you explain?
People get attached intellectually and emotionally to their analogies,
and it’s very hard to shake. If you look at Sun, Scott McNealy often
uses analogies drawn from the auto business. He argues that buyers
should be interested in the whole package, not the components, because
when they buy a car, they care about the whole car, not where the
carburetor comes from. But you have to question how dispassionately he
can assess that analogy. His father worked for years in the auto
business, and his sons are named for auto models: Maverick, Scout, Colt
and Dakota.Tell me about confirmation bias. It appears that human
beings tend strongly to seek out data that confirms their beliefs and
invest too little in seeking out disconfirming data. We like to be
right. If analogies come into our heads, we can always find elements of
reality to confirm our belief in them.
I also have to give a positive plug for the warning on confirmation biases. This is a key thing taught Day 1 at many management consulting firms to test and mitigate biases for, but it is something which operating company employees seem to be less aware of (based on my anecdotal experiences). Not sure why this is so, but to be fair, management consultants also have tendencies for certain blindspots as compared to operating company employees.
But I digress. In any case, by all means use storytelling in management, especially when trying to establish some ground in a complex business area, but be aware of the pitfalls because anchors can be hard to shake and because stories should not be taken as universal truths.
I have pretty limited access to the network right now, but thought I would link to a funny but insightful post by uber blogger Kottke that reports on his fund raising results to support himself as a full-time blogger. The graph on the front page is instructional for bloggers aspiring to support a career solely through blogging … Kottke reports he was clearly able to break the "Ramen noodle" barrier, which is as reported by Kottke, "the point at which I could each something besides ramen noodles for every meal". He wasn’t quite able to make his comfort zone of 1/3 pre-blogging salary …
For those that eat two Ramen noodle meals per say, that’s like a budget of $0.50 per day, right?
Amazing how a brand like Ramen can not only describe a near bottom-end point of one’s sustainable lifestyle but also be a widespread loved food and tasty snack.
In other fund raising news over the weekend, Joshua Schachter reports more on the investors in del.icio.us.