Business Bricks

“I’m not anticomputer — I’ve been a programmer for more than 20 years. I’m not anticapitalist — I’m on my fifth start-up. But I am anti-arrogance.” — Paul English interview w/ the New York Times.
Paul’s site gethuman.com is a cheat sheet of numbers to press to get a human, not a bot, when calling customer service numbers.

Another thing I believe but can’t prove is that if you give away an idea you can’t use, the void is filled almost immediately by another, usually more workable idea: [1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

“To understand how and why something works, study the thing itself, not the maker.” Finally, I found a useful essay on Craigslist.

I’m not sure if the award is worth entering, but I like how the voting procedure mimics real-life: a panel of designers decide what to present to a panel of clients who decide what to present to a panel of the general public who, er, just decide.

How NOT to talk!

Write an email to send to yourself in two years time.

[1] Have you ever tried to sell a diamond? “An N. W. Ayer copywriter came up with the caption “A Diamond Is Forever” […] even though diamonds can in fact be shattered, chipped, discolored, or incinerated to ash.” The cartels peddled the fib because, apart from not being forever, diamonds weren’t even scarce. They were scared that if the public started reselling diamonds the diamond market would disintegrate. [2] See also The Scarcity Shortage.

Lego means play well in Danish or I put together in Latin. Link.

[1] Awesome article about Lego in Wired
[2] Go here and click download sample. Read p15. Can you think of fifty uses for a brick in fifteen minutes?

Jeff & Seth & Inc think so.

“Depending on whom you talk to, SEOs are either the Saint Bernards of the Web, helping to rescue lost sites, or glorified spammers.” Link.

10 years to save the high street
Yesterday a group of 79 MPs published a 91-page report.
They say we have 10 years to save the high st.

Thanks to the All-Parliamentary Small Shops Group for
getting the issue airtime, but they have no legislative
teeth — and their suggestions can’t work.

What can’t work
[1] Appointing a retail tsar
[2] Lobbying Government

What can work
[1] Tescopoly.org
“Every little hurts.”
Launched yesterday. Join local campaigns.

[2] Co-competition
I wrote about this before. If you’re a small retailer you
really need to work with and rally other small retailers
nearby. Small example: instead of own-branded shopping
bags, why not print-up bags that carry the names of
your neighbours too?

[3] Help me make a list
As a consumer, and as a business owner (albeit non bricks
& mortar) I want to save the high street. I think the
best way to do that isn’t to bemoan clone towns — but to
help celebrate the most remarkable high streets.

For example, in my locality, I love —
Church St, N16
Essex Rd, N1
Cheshire St, E2

Help me make a list of remarkable high streets.
To add a high street, add a comment.

One failure of the web has been that group email and group IM don’t work any better than conference calls. This might just fix that.

A study shows that we’ve only a 50-50 chance of ascertaining the tone of any e-mail message. The solution isn’t emoticons.

What I don’t understand is how supermarkets can argue that people vote with their wallets. Isn’t that how rotten boroughs worked?

Even A-listers like Tom can get fooled by the Professional/ Pan-Am smile. (Official definition by David Foster Wallace: “the smile that doesn’t quite reach the smiler’s eyes and that signifies nothing more than a calculated attempt to advance the smiler’s own interests by pretending to like the smilee.”)

Meta-help from Slashdot.
I still say just don’t do it.

“I think we should start taking another look at some of those dotcom business plans from 1999 and 2000.” bubble, boom & bust.

Spunk & Bite by Arthur Plotnik. 48 years on, Random House publish an unofficial update to Strunk & White’s Elements of Style.

Jakob Nielsen has lost the battery to his torch recently, but his column yesterday is a return to form.

At the turn of each year, philosophical discussion group Edge puts a question to its membership. I’m thirteen months late answering this one, from 2004/5, but below is an a-j of factoids that I hold to be true, but can’t prove.

[a] You are what you think
[b] Google isn’t evil
[c] HR is dead. PR is next
[d] Delete is the most underused key on your keyboard
[e] Strangers are more likely to tell you the truth than friends
[f] Snap decisions, on average, beat considered decisions
[g] Mastery of slang is more useful than mastery of grammar
[h] Nothing is more powerful than information
[i] If you look out for numbers two to ten, you’ll live longer than if you look out for number one
[j] Most of all, I believe breakfast is the most important meal of the day

My friend Charlie * lent me this line: “Think what you would do if only you had the money - then figure out how you can do it anyway.” Try also: “Having no money sharpens the wits. [It] forces you never to make the wrong decision.” **

* Charlie is number one of many editors at Pick Me Up. In his spare time he’s working on a project to start a school.

** from The Manual: How To Have A Number One The Easy Way by Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty.