Morgan's Tumbleblog

Rollip is a fun little service that takes your high quality digital photos and turns them into your parent’s Polariods, complete with sentimental value. There’s something charming about less-than-perfect. Sure 12 MB pro photos off my DLSR are great; but for more mundane and everyday shots there’s something poignant about a sense of time and place in the past. Kind of like an homage to simpler, easier times, all with the touch of a button. Imperfections feel more real sometimes I guess.

Fun, cool, thought you might like it too.

Here is the digital copy of Chris Anderson’s new book, Free. And there it is, online, for free, for you to read at your lesiure online. Of course to get the book in any sort of form that doesn’t require you to deal w/72 dpi you either have to pay the full boat for the hard cover or luck into a limited run of Adobe sponsored paperback versions.

From Mr. Anderson’s blog on any other (namely Kindle and other ebook readers) versions:

“Next up, in the coming week: free FREE on Kindle and other ebook readers, including the iPhone.”

Because I am tired I will keep this short. Of course Mr. Anderson “needed” to give away his book for free in one form or another, lest the hypocrite title be to loudly proclaimed upon the book arrival; but this notion of giving away “Free” for free on ebook readers like the Kindle is a marketing miscalculation of no small order.

The book has been out for a full 5 days now and we don’t have the slightest clue when the Kindle version is coming out. And when it does it will be free, but it will be free precisely for the wrong reasons. If the real time web has taught us anything, it is that in terms of the news, information loses value over time. The newer the information (w/a big caveat around accuracy) the more value it has. “Free” has more value to me the closer it is to the publishing date; and I imagine, the same holds true for other Geeks like me who are interested in reading it and joining in on the conversation.

But, I can’t. I have to wait for the free version to come to the Kindle if I want to experience the book that I want to experience it (that is, on my Kindle without a hardcover and at greater than 72 dpi). I have to wait to get it for free, when I would’ve gladly paid a premium to get it at publishing time. The missed opportunity is the idea of what is more valuable to people - either free or as soon as possible. I believe many other geeks would choose as soon as possible over free and a week late (of course, I could be wrong).

What Mr. Anderson and his publishers missed out on was a person like me who would’ve paid the full book price for the Kindle version just to get it the day it came out. I would’ve paid a premium on top of the book price to get a Kindle version a day before the hardcover hit the bookstores. I would have paid for the privilege to be a part of the unfolding conversation around the book. But now, that opportunity is gone.

Now I’ll get it for free, a week or two after the bulk of the conversation is gone. Instead of reading it right off the bat and consuming it and then writing about it and telling everyone about it, it will go in my list of books to read and I’ll get to it eventually.

What a missed opportunity. Never try to figure out what people want without asking them. I’d have gladly plunked down my money for a Kindle version of Free without a second thought. Now, I’ll download it when I get around to it…

For the most part, the traditional news outlets lead and the blogs follow, typically by 2.5 hours, according to a new computer analysis of news articles and commentary on the Web during the last three months of the 2008 presidential campaign.

This article in today’s New York Times cites a recent study that shows that traditional news outlets (like say, the New York Times?) break news ahead of blogs and then blogs pick up the story about 2.5 hours after.

The article, a nice pat on the back for all those paid go-getters at the dying newspapers, ignores a couple of key problems with the research and findings.

1. This was based on the last three months of the Presidential campaign. A campaign where every major news outlet spent millions and millions of dollars shuttling huge press corps around the country hanging on every word. (And still, with a huge payroll and reporters supposedly on top of every candidate’s every word, blogs still broke 3.5% of stories with much fewer resources and staff. ) Most news events, outside of say major events like the Super Bowl and the Presidential election are not as thoroughly over-covered and invested in by major news outlets. I imagine a much more representative sample of news would show that blogs break a much larger portion of news (like, say Michael Jackson’s death).

2. The study neglects Twitter and other real time platforms like FriendFeed and Facebook. It’s well known that these platforms (particularly Twitter and FriendFeed) break news much faster than any other news source - even primary sources typically relied on by the news. Any time an earthquake happens is a perfect example of this, with Twitter typically beating the USGA Web site with reporting on the event.

Those two major factors make this article and study particularly irrelevant, and seem a less than genuine attempt by the New York Times to proclaim relevance and value in the world of real time information, instead of being relegated to purveyors of “aged news.”

Further, and more interesting/exciting is how far the real time Web has come in such a short period of time. Between the time this study was done (less than 6 months ago) and now, the real time Web has taken off in terms of acceptance and importance across a wide swath of the population. With the mass adoption of Twitter and a major investment in real time technologies and search by venture capitalists, Google, Microsoft and a host of others, the real time Web is quickly going from a novelty (Twitter and what you’re eating for lunch) to a movement that will redefine the news cycle and the value of information on the Web.

“What we want right now is a way to more intelligently sort through everything,” said Caroline McCarthy, who writes about social media and digital advertising for CNET News. “I think a lot of the big developments are going to come in the space of technology used to filter all this information.”

Great (unpublished) article about Twitter and what’s next. (h/t Steve Rubel)

A great article in the New York Times about video start up Howcast. Howcast makes entertaining how-to videos about everything. They’ve made some really clever videos that are very entertaining.

One of the things that I like about them is that they’re making lightly branded sponsored content, which is where I think the power of video really lies.

Forget the pre-roll spots and television ads ported to the Web. Those clearly don’t work. People sit through them just to get to the content they want. They may click occasionally, but the experience is designed with the advertiser in mind, not the user. Sponsored content on the other hand engages, informs and entertains while still delivering a lightly branded message that can create awareness and action from the user - all while built with the user in mind.

My favorite quote from the piece (and I couldn’t agree more):

Sometimes — and this is a difficult sentence for a newspaper to print — it’s easier to learn from a video.

Disclosure: I work for TurnHere, an online video production and advertising company that creates branded video content for the Web. The views and opinions here are my own and do not represent those of TurnHere.

An interesting thing happens when your customer base reaches a certain size: You cease having edge cases.

I love this quote. One of the things I am most passionate about is creating an incredible brand experience through the delivery of that experience across an organization, consistently, to everyone. The great brands do this, and that is why they are great. More than the ad campaigns and the logos and the viral videos - it is their singular focus on delivering an amazing customer experience from top to bottom, every time, without fail.

And it’s harder than it looks. Why? Because of edge cases. Because it can be really hard to fulfill your promise consistently to everyone, especially the very small silvers of your customer base that don’t fit neatly in to your strategic plan. As you grow it gets harder (and exponentially so) to fulfill your brand promise to every customer because you start to deal with a wide range of people and customers who have different needs and expectations. Compounding the problem for young companies is the fact that their brands have been more malleable and open to interpretation than more established companies, making their expectation set wider and harder to meet when things (like customer service, products, policies and the like) start to scale.

Part of growing pains is in determining how to manage your brand expectations in those edge cases (which are now more than just one or a handful of ‘difficult’ or ‘unreasonable’ customers) to ensure that everything you’ve stood for as a brand is upheld, even in the face of growth, revenues, etc.

If you’re a company that is trying to build a great brand (like 37signals) you take the long view and realize that 1% means a lot to your brand. You can’t write it off and rest easy knowing the other 99% is still pleased. Because at that point you’ve compromised, and it will be easier to do it again and again. If you’re strictly focused on profits and growth, then you take the short view, and you compromise. And you tell yourself that it’s OK, and it’s only this one time, and you won’t do it again. And you lose the ‘difficult’ customers and life goes back to normal and you feel OK about compromising knowing you won’t do it but that one time. Until it happens again, and again,and…

And then you’ve quickly become just another commodity service. And you’ve built a nice revenue stream on the backs of uninspired customers with zero loyalty who are waiting for something to come along and wow them.

So whether you’re a sole proprietor and growing start-up or a company at that magical level where you’re making the leap, don’t compromise. Don’t write off the edge cases. It’s the surest way to stay true to your brand promise, your customers and yourself.

Note: If you’re not reading Signal vs. Noise you’re missing out on one of the best company blogs on the planet.

My son loves my iPhone. He knows he’s got games, the Wiggles, Caillou, and the Backyardigans loaded on there. We also have some saved searches on YouTube for funny stuff. It’s amazing how confident he is with the phone. My mom on the other hand would be terrified by it.

My favorite part? It’s too slow for him. When the YouTube content takes awhile to load he switches to Blues Clues on the TV.

It just reminds me how much things have changed. His generation will be completely different. On-demand, fully-customized, fully-portable, a world of abundance. I’m very excited for him.

CHATEAUX ON CENTRAL This project in downtown Phoenix was supposed to include nearly two dozen luxury homes, priced from $2.8 million to $4.5 million. But by early 2007, the city’s high-end condominium market — which was among the country’s hottest — had become oversaturated. Prices started to fall, and Chateaux on Central’s developer, Central PHX Partners, declared bankruptcy.

Wow this is a stunning slide show of the excess that has plagued our society in the last 20 years; leading to the great real estate bust for the ages. Some of these images are haunting. Definitely worth reflecting on what happened and ask “how’d we get so far out of whack?”