The Geeks Shall Inherit The Earth
Josh’s article in The Bulletin is online. I didn’t come out too bad! Thanks Josh, great article. Shout out to Marty Wells and Nik Cubrilovic who also got good coverage.
Looking for accommodation in San Fran Oct 25 – Nov 15
Okay so my trip to the US is confirmed. I’m arriving in LA on Oct 22 to attend the Digital Hollywood conference and then heading down to San Fran on Oct 25 or 26. I’ll be presenting at the ANZA TECH conference from Oct 30 – Nov 1 and then sticking around in SF until Thanksgiving. I’m doing the trip on an extreme budget so I’m looking for people to stay with while in SF. I’ll be bringing a sleeping bag. Just need any old floor. And wifi. 🙂
The Anza Tech conference is on in Sunnyvale, so something close to that would be handy.
Any takers? Please email me.
Also looking for advice on getting a mobile phone SIM card to use while I’m there. In the past I’ve bought a pre-paid T-Mobile card but they are BLOODY expensive. There has to be a better way. It’s just for finding people when I’m out and lost.
Anyone who wants to catch up with me while I’m over there, just drop me a line. Especially if have lots of money to invest in a podcast network or you want to be part of the TPN US management team.
Get This Week’s Bulletin Magazine
Josh Gliddon has written an article about Aussie Web2.0 entrepreneurs which is coming out in this week’s edition of The Bulletin magazine. I was interviewed for the story and apparently I’m on the cover (that was the photo shoot last weekend). Hopefully it’ll give us some good exposure in this country although the gist of the article is that Aussie web entrepreneurs need to go over to the US to get realistic valuations for their start-ups. It’s pretty cool that Josh has written this 2nd article on TPN at this defining moment for the business – he wrote the first mainstream media article on TPN back in February 2005 just as we were getting started, so this kind of feels like nicely orchestrated bookends. I’d link to the original article he wrote but Ninemsn’s archives seem to be completely borked.
Torrent of the Week
My Torrent of the Week this week is The Rolling Stone Magazines 500 Greatest Songs Of All Time. Lots of tracks in here I have never even heard of before. Lots I already have too but it doesn’t hurt to have them collected together into a single playlist.
Had a surreal morning today. Was in the city at 8.30am having my photo taken by Julian Kingma, one of Australia’s top celebrity photographers. We shot some stuff in Hosier Lane and some more behind Federation Square. I asked Julian what the favourite photo he’d ever taken was and he said this one of the late Rene Rivkin which he won the 1997 Melbourne Press Club Quill Award. We talked about the some of the people he’s met, including Jamie Oliver, who he shot recently at the opening of Melbourne’s Fifteen restaurant and says is a really nice bloke, and Samuel L. Jackson. What an interesting line of work. For the record (for you, Scott Sherman), Julian prefers shooting on non-digital cameras, although today he was using a Nikon D100.
Knowing When to Quit by Scott Adams
Tom Reynolds (the now infamous sacked Telstra blogger) sent me this link today to Scott "Dilbert" Adams’ blog post on "Knowing When To Quit". It has some great advice.
So how do you know when to bail out of a losing idea?
I heard a useful rule about predicting success during my (failed) attempt at creating a hit Dilbert animated TV show. While watching the Dilbert pilot being tested on a focus group, an experienced executive explained to me the most non-intuitive way to predict success. Since then I’ve observed it to be true a number of times. It goes like this:
If everyone exposed to a product likes it, the product will not succeed.
Think about that for a minute before I explain why everyone liking something predicts failure. If you get this answer right, I’m guessing that you are already successful yourself. Tell me in the comments if I’m right about that.
The reason that a product “everyone likes†will fail is because no one “loves†it. The only thing that predicts success is passion, even if only 10% of the consumers have it. For example, I’m willing to bet that when the TV show Baywatch was tested, 90% of the people rolled their eyes and gave it a thumbs down. But I’ll bet 10% of the test audience had tents in their pants. Bingo.
Dilbert was the same way. From the very beginning, the vast majority of people who saw it didn’t care for it. But 10% who saw it not only liked it, they cut it out and mailed it to friends. They talked about it. They hung it on walls. They were passionate about it. Before the first Dilbert reprint book was sold, I heard stories of people making their own Dilbert books from newspaper clippings. Bingo.
Anyone who knows me well will recognize this story. I always say that when I speak in front of any large group of people, it breaks down like this: 10% of the audience think I’m a complete wanker, 10% of the audience think I’m terrific, and the other 80% are just bewildered. So I focus on the 10% who "get" me and don’t worry too much about the rest. I’m also now working on a plan to try to get more of the 80% to at least remember my name. You learn very early in a sales career that success is all about the "doing the numbers". My first sales job involved lots of cold call selling. You would ring 100 people. 50 would meet with you. 25 would be interested in your product. 15 will tell you they are going to buy your product. 5 actually will. 5 won’t. 5 will just keep stalling you indefinitely because they are too scared to tell you they are a "no". As we used to say SWSWSW – Some Will, Some Won’t, So What.
Another report says Australian newspapers in massive decline
Hugh Martin reports "The Australian Press Council has just released The State of the News Print Media in Australia Report 2006…… I can’t help but think there’s a lot of wishful thinking going on in this report. The authors are by and large working editors, with a couple of academics thrown in for good measure."
I haven’t read the report yet but this graph above (click on it to bring up the full size version) pretty much tells the true story. Look at the graph on the right. Look at the decline in circulation since 1999. Now grab a ruler and extend that line downwards. If you are so inclined, make the decline exponential.
Face it, my friends in the newspaper business. Things are changing faster than many of you care to admit. I know Hugh isn’t one of those. Neither is Mark Jones at the AFR. Don’t forget to buy a copy today to read about Telstra v Tom Reynolds.