Being Mark Cohen

For real. 8am too.
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For those who’re interested, Garr Reynolds was on ABC Radio national yesterday, and the podcast is available here.  He is right at the end, about 80% of the way through.  Enjoy

I was lucky enough to be one of the 200 people who gathered at The Wesley centre today to hear Garr do a presentation on Presentation Zen.  I think the entire presentation can be summed up as follows:  Your slides must look professional and be simple, clean and elegant.  You must know your material well.  You are not there to talk to your powerpoint or show what the technology can do.  You’re there to tell a story.

As Garr said, most of his content is already available through the website, my notes follow:

Intro

• Currently living in Japan. Some humorous talk about “Garr”
• From the US originally, from Oregon
• Touches on Manga and Kawaii culture
• Talks about the clutter and how busy things look in Japan, and contrasts buying a fridge which is so covered in promo material with buying a desk, where oyu can see the whole thing
• On ABC Radio National at 09h00 tomorrow (Saturday 5 July - I recomend tuning in to listen) 
• Used to work for Sumitomo Electric - A global Japanese corporation
• Today, he is a tenured professor of management at Kansai Gaidai University
• Also Runs “design matters” design group  in Osaka, like a mini-TED
• Also a Musician, plays in a jazz band for fun.
• Quotes Sir Ken Robinson “I always think of public speaking as a little bit like playing Jazz”
• Worked at Apple.  Learned to prepare his presentations away the computer there.  

On presentation, quotes: “Presentation is the ‘Killer Skill’ we take into the real world. It’s almost an unfair advantage” - Quoted from The McKinsey Mind

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I saw a tweet come through (the image in this post) a few minutes ago that alarmed me. Not because it was saying do or do not deal with someone, quite the contrary. It was the implications of the tweet that caught my attention. Mark Pesce speaks about this effect when he talks about twitter. This user has a relatively small reach. About a hundred followers. BUT…a lot of their followers are active in the same industry being referred to. A business deal seems to have not gone smoothly, and ended up requiring intervention to get payment. As someone who worked as a consultant previously, this would serve as a caution to me. More the person referred to than the poster (although it’s entirely possible that payment was withheld for a reason). Most consultants are more weary of clients who dispute and withhold payment than of anything else.

A post to the opposite effect – like “Just finished a project with XXX and we’ve already been paid – what a great client” would be worth more to a client than they realize. Couple this with Duncan Riley’s furious warnings earlier today to avoid an accounting firm he had bad experience with and there’s a playing out today of real trend. The power testimonials has gone exponential with the freeing of your customers’ voices. The unhappy ones will reach for that keyboard and cast your mistakes in stone. Look out for it and make them happy. Everyone makes mistakes – the point is you need to repair them before they get to this.

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Imaging trying to work with this going on and on and on and on and on and on and on….

’nuff said.

That title would get attention It also happens to be the name of a set of tools by Security Compass. Security Compass Exploit-Me tools are (currently) free Firefox Add-ons that you can use to test your sites for XSS and SQL injection vulnerabilities, as well as unauthorized resource access testing. I’ve started running them on some of our major traffic pages and thankfully they haven’t come up with anything. Well worth a look though, if you’re involved in web development – especially the SQL injection one if you use SQL Server, as there’s some serious
SQL
Injection going around now.

I had an interesting chat about culture and changing the system recently, and Hugh at GapingVoid (one of my favourite blogs, marketing meets business meets art) nailed it with his humour and art. George is changing the system from the inside In his post Hugh talks about large tech companies and responds to a question about the cultural problems that accompany growth with

It’s not the sum of their parts that is the problem; it’s the way human beings relate with each other, interact with each other, that is causing the problem.

This is an interesting (and I believe accurate) observation, and he alludes to an effect which is in essence that as the number of people that are involved in something increases so too does the number of people that each person has to negotiate with. It’s an O(n^2) problem :) [Edit: It's actually on Wikipedia and described as Metcalfe's Law] Every stakeholder you add to a situation increases the management complexity (and cost and risk) exponentially.  I believe this is key to why entrepeneurialism thrives with less than ten stakeholders and dies with much more As hugh says in closing,

The sad truth remains that everything in business is about people, their interactions with each other and the ideas and assumptions that shape those interactions.

And right there he’s hit the nail on the head.  It’s not about resources or heads or hands or bums on seats.  It’s about people.  It’s about empowering, trusting, delegating and supporting.  It’s about asking how the weekend was and chatting for a few minutes between crises.  I’ve had my share of underperforming teams in the past and the easiest way to fix them is by restructuring or restaffing them.  That’s good management.  But it says nothing about my leadership.  Leadership is about providing the inspiration - not just the vision. An inspired person can change the system from the inside because he feels like he’s soaring above the crowd.  when an inspired person works until midnight it is not because he’s trying to get ahead.  It’s because he wants his team to win.

Going on a thought from Seth Yates, I found this nifty feature in GMail.  Basically if you use GMail you can add anything to your email address with a plus, and it will still come to your inbox.  So for example you can set up your.name+tax.invoices@gmail.com to be tagged with “tax-claim” or downloaded to a folder called called “tax invoices”.   You can use this in combination with a GMail filter to help manage emails that need to be actioned by creating an email filter that will add a tag to emails, so for example an email sent to your.name+bills@gmail.com would automatically be tagged as “unpaid”, and you’d clear the tag .  This could allow you to track where people are getting your email address from too.

I was lucky enough to get to go up on stage and present a small case study for DelicateGenius and ShaneMo art Remix this year, in Sydney and Melbourne. Remix rocked. I presented some cool stuff done by some of the smart guys who work on my team, focused on http://drive.com.au. Before I go much further I need to acknowledge the guys who did this stuff in the Drive team – it’s their work.

Compatibility Meta Tag

Our sites have been developed to make heavy use of css, and there are a lot of workarounds and hacks in the stylesheets to make everything work on all the various supported browsers. To make the transition to a css compliant IE easier, there is now a meta tag that allows sites to force IE 8 to use IE7 compatibility mode:

<meta http-equiv=”X-UA-Compatible” content=”IE=7″ />

Adding this meta tag to your sites’ headers will buy you time to manage the changes rather than forcing you to do some rapid-fire audits and further hacks to your css. The example below shows the massive impact of css compatibility in IE as seen on Drive.

Webslices

The Drive tech guys added a webslice on their homepage, which allows IE8 users to clip content to the browser’s shortcut bar. When the featured article on the homepage changes, the browser alerts the user by updating the title in the webslice and bolding the text in the toolbar. This extends the reach of the site and allows a “call to action” to be triggered in the user’s browser when they’re not on your site.

Activities

Activities are a great way to extend the reach of functions within your site beyond your site’s domain. The Drive guys built one that can be seen here: http://www.drive.com.au/activities

This activity uses their free text search capability and extends the reach of their search function to any site with relevant text. The guys at Microsoft identified a pattern in user behavior which involved highlighting some text on a web page, copying it, going to another page, and then using the text. Activities offer a way for site owners to make this action that much easier for a user – and to extend your reach into your competitors sites.

To grab a copy of IE8 and for more info on webslices and activities go here.

Inspired by recent posts by Duncan Riley and Josh Anstey, and discussions with Seth Yates, I took a long hard look at my old blog and started feeling it needed a creative refresh. I spent a few nights trawling through the usual sources of Wordpress themes but in the end decided that my old theme was closer to what I wanted than anything free or commercial that I could find.  So I did some mods to the stylesheet and images using borrowed inspiration from some major sites for layout, and a fair amount of trial and error with IE ,Firefox and Safari.  I did most of the css mods using a trial version of a really cool mac tool called Coda (by an awesomely-named company called “Panic”) and most of the image editing using a tool called cropper to screen-grab and paint.net to edit.  In the end I’ve come up with a theme that I really like, and I think will last a few more years.  Let me know what you think

Dogs are amazing.  Immediately loyal, always forgiving, and always happy.  I had a dog my whole life, up until we moved to Sydney.  Now after several years here we finally got another dog.  A very little dog.  My boys have gone mad for her.  They compete for her attention, and my big guy makes her dinner.

Having a dog in the house changes the whole dynamic.  My kids seem happier, and now I have some company when I spend all night busy on the computer :P  Most surprising is how my wife has taken to her - she keeps coming home with new treats and toys.  This is going to be one spoiled little dog.

Happy Mother’s Day to all the mums out there, and good luck to all the dads who forgot

The ABS posted some interesting stats in a media release, reproduced and linked below highlighting added by me:

Mothers’ day facts and figures from the ABS (Media Release)
Mothers’ day facts and figures from the ABS

* The median age of mothers who gave birth in 2006 was 30.8, up from 29.2 in 1996.
* Women could expect to have 1.8 children in their lifetime in 2006, the most since 1995.
* Births are up - Australia registered 265,900 births during 2006 - more than in any year during the last three decades.
* More mothers with children aged under 15 years are employed than in the past. Almost two-thirds (63%) of mothers with children aged under 15 years were employed in March 2008, compared with 54% ten years earlier.
* 60% of employed mothers with children aged under 15 years worked part time.
* As employment among mothers has increased, the use of formal child care has also increased. The percentage of children under the age of 12 years attending formal care increased from 14% in 1996 to 23% in 2005.
* In 2006, mothers with children aged under 15 years spent, on average, between 16 hours per week (for those employed full time) to 28 hours per week (for those not employed) caring for children.
* In 2005, 83% of employed mothers with very young children (aged under 2 years) used some form of working arrangement to help balance work and child care responsibilities. The arrangements most commonly used were flexible working hours, used by 44% of employed mothers; permanent part-time work, used by 39%; and working from home, used by 27%.
* 67% of mothers in a couple family with children aged under 15 years, and 61% of lone mothers with children aged under 15 years, reported in 2006 that they ‘always or often felt rushed or pressed for time’

These stats scream out for more online facilities aimed at mothers who are caring for kids. One such site built by two mums is Part Time Online, a job portal aimed squarely at the part time / jobsharing market.

Aother observation: Most mothers feel time-poor and ironically more mothers who have a partner feel time-poor than single mums. That says something really bad about some of us dads….

Ebay today announced that they would be doing a distribution deal with Drive.com.au. This deal will see drive.com.au serving significantly more inventory, taking a big step in an iteration of growing the business which can only do them good in terms of audience growth, site traffic and leads generated.

We’re pleased to announce today a listing distribution deal between eBay Motors and Drive.com.au that will see the integration of eBay Motors listings onto Drive.com.au and vice versa.

This is great news for buyers and sellers alike providing greater choice and larger audiences with no extra cost or hassle!

To ensure you get the most out of this exciting new partnership, we’ve also revamped the eBay Motors site - it has a fresh look and feel as well as some great new features and functions making it easier to find and buy the item you want:

* Enhanced search features allowing you to quickly narrow down your options so only the items that interest you are displayed
* A scrolling live marketplace featuring a selection of some of the best cars on the site
* Easy to navigate category tabs

The new site is only in beta phase at the moment and is not yet replacing the current eBay Motors site…

The new beta eBay site is at cars2.ebay.com.au.

Ebay recently announced in a release to their affiliate network that they would be shutting down their long-standing relationship with Commission Junction and would be launching their own channel, ebay partner network. This new channel offers easy setup and direct deposit payment into Australian bank accounts.

The ebay - Drive distribution deal would be a development carsales.com.au would want to keep a close eye on. It will bulk up ebay’s cars section significantly and will provide some good opportunity for ebay affiliate marketers to make some money, and with their help it could potentially catapult ebay up in the rankings for car sales. The content distribution deal introduces and empowers a whole new dynamic in that classifieds vertical. I’ll be watching with interest.