I'm a three-time (soon to be four-time) published author. When aspiring authors learn this, they invariably ask what word processor I use. It doesn't fucking matter! I happen to write in Emacs. I also code in Emacs, which is a nice bonus. Other people write and code in vi. Other people write in Microsoft Word and code in TextMate+ or TextEdit or some fancy web-based collaborative editor like EtherPad or Google Wave. Whatever. Picking the right text editor will not make you a better writer. Writing will make you a better writer. Writing, and editing, and publishing, and listening -- really listening -- to what people say about your writing. This is the golden age for aspiring writers. We have a worldwide communications and distribution network where you can publish anything you want and -- if you can manage to get anybody's attention -- get near-instant feedback. Writers just 20 years ago would have killed for that kind of feedback loop. Killed! And you're asking me what word processor I use? Just fucking write, then publish, then write some more. One day your writing will get featured on a site like Reddit and you'll go from 5 readers to 5000 in a matter of hours, and they'll all tell you how much your writing sucks. And most of them will be right! Learn how to respond to constructive criticism and filter out the trolls, and you can write the next great American novel in edlin.

Bingo.  Do yourself and read Mark Pilgrim on The Setup, which is interesting way, way beyond this little quip about writing.

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Todd Wasserman, reporting for BrandWeek:

By opting for these tin-eared retorts, AT&T does nothing but set itself up as a foe to consumers. At a conference in New York in early December, CEO Ralph de la Vega responded to charges that AT&T’s iPhone service was slow by turning condescending. “The first thing we need to do is educate consumers about what represents a megabyte of data,” de la Vega told reporters—this while floating the idea of charging heavy users more than others.

AT&T’s position seems to be that consumers are consuming way more data than the company had expected and everyone just needs to chill until the company can recover from this inconsiderate overuse. When the conceit is that ass-backwards, no amount of spin is effective.

If there's one company whose reputation has been steadily slaughtered over the past two years, it's AT&T.  The malign is deserved: I have followed the blogs, Twitter conversations and press releases as much as the next gadget/tech geek, and to me it's plainly clear that AT&T hasn't learned any lessons from brands who have had their business practices change due to consumers leveraging social channels.

But it's even worse than that.  They view iPhone users as the problem that led to their damaged brand, not their shoddy network to begin with or nearly flat capital expenditures since the iPhone's inception.

As a realtively new AT&T customer (who joined simply because of the iPhone), the vibe I get is that they believe it's easier to milk this iPhone thing -- however long it goes in exclusivity -- for all it's worth than it is to listen to your customers, address negative feedback, and build out your network to accomodate your users happily using your product.  AT&T had a chance to become something special, pehaps even to vy for extentend exclusivity, but instead chose to treat the iPhone deal as a racehorse: flog it as hard as you can until it dies, keep the share price at a decent level, get your bonuses, and move on to what's next.  That sort of myopia will be part of AT&T's enduring legacy, especially when they could have built a race team and made their customers their fans.

When the iPhone opens up to other carriers in the US, AT&T will see a hemhorraging of subscribers like never before.  Given how I drop at least a call day with AT&T, I will likely be among them.

Enjoy your early termination fees, Mr. Stephenson: they're the last vestige of what could have been.

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Tim O'Reilly, reporting just after the Nexus One press event:

News from the front: a possible turning point for Android. I've been a huge iPhone fan, but after using the Nexus One for a few weeks, I find so much to like that I'm close to the point where Android might be my first choice. While I may yet go back to my iPhone, I'm conflicted.

As an iPhone user who was impressed with the Motorola Droid but not enough to consider ditching my iPhone for it, the Nexus One already has me thinking that Apple better bring its biggest guns to the 2010 mobile web fight. While Twitter is ablaze about how the Nexus One is the iPhone killer, I think that's premature: anyone who's been doing this a while knows that Apple has had good G2 on this for a while now, and the next version of the iPhone (slated for the now-traditional June/July release) isn't going to concede much to today's Nexus One.

Should be interesting, but all speculation aside, it's time to remember this: when smart companies compete, customers always win. It's a beautiful thing.

(Via @khurtwilliams)

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Robert Scoble:

The writing is on the wall. Small business marketing is moving away from focusing on SEO. Why do I say that? Because, well, Google and Bing are changing the rules so often and are getting so good at figuring out the real businesses that deserve to be on pages. Search Half Moon Bay Sushi and you get real answers from sites that didn’t focus on SEO. Yeah, there are exceptions, but they are increasingly getting rare.

With other searches, like one for Tiger Woods, you’ll get a page filled with stuff that SEO just doesn’t affect much anymore. In the middle of that page is a real time box that brings items from Twitter and Google News. It no longer is good enough to be just an SEO expert to get items onto pages like these. You’ve gotta be great at creating content that gets Google’s algorithms to trust it enough to shove it onto these new hybrid pages.

But there’s something deeper going on. Google has built systems that aren’t Page Rank controlled anymore and are giving far better analytics to small businesses than they did a year ago. They know a LOT more about your behavior now other than you clicked on a link, even to the extent that they know whether you called that business or bought something and THAT is changing the skills SEO/SEM types need to have.

No longer is it about optimizing search engine results and the new breed is going beyond just search engines to provide holistic systems that find and track customers not only on search engines like Google and Bing, but on social networks like Facebook and Twitter.

I see the same thing.  I do very little SEO/SEM work on my employer's blog or main website, but our search performance has skyrocketed over the past year.

Why?

As near as I can tell, consistent content creation.  As a company that believes in engaging its community and customers, we try to post something to that blog every weekday, and we’ve done a pretty good job of it all year.  No author of that blog writes for keyword karma: we simply post content that we think will be useful or interesting to our customers, prospects and industry colleagues.  The rest just happens, and I attribute that to consistency.

Of course, our company has aircover from its Twitter and Facebook activity too, and as the new real-time web emerges, new content developed through these channels will factor into search performance.  Early this year, I was telling people how consistent, quality tweeting was important to draw new followers through Twitter’s official search engine.  Now, as 2010 approaches and social content is being integrated into Google and Bing search results, the importance simply cannot be overstated.

The ground is shifting away from static SEO keyword saturation and more towards behavior-driven merit systems.  Google and Bing are getting smarter at weeding out SEO farming sites (save a few examples, like appliance searches), and during 2010 I think we’ll see the semantic web in the sense that search engines will understand intent much better than they do now.  That’s not to say the system won’t be gamed anymore, but increasingly new content, interaction and effort will be rewarded rather than metadata and keyword concentrations on business websites.

So.  All that said, what’s the real value of intelligent, consistent social media activity for business?  If it wasn’t massive before, it is now.

(crosspost)

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CNN:

A Facebook page stating that Friday was "Kick a Ginger Day," referring to redheads and possibly inspired by an episode of the "South Park" series, may have sparked the injuries at the middle school, authorities said.

Facebook and South Park are easy targets, and social media in particular has made it easy for like-minded people to implusively act on an idea, no matter how stupid.  In the past, galvanizing a message like this wouldn't have been so easy.

My problem with this is that, once again, there is no personal accountability in the equation.  What differentiates the kids who saw the Facebook page and didn't act from those who did?

Answer: Parenting, personal accountability and character.  Unfortunately, these things can't be taught by ESPN, Modern Warfare, or the Internet.

With every new advance in technology -- let's call them 'tools' -- comes and equal and opposite requirement for education on how to properly use those tools.  It's not easy to understand the unintentional liabilities they bring to our lives, both as users and parents/supervisors.  But we have to do it.  Blanket demonization of the tool when almost no effort has been put into personal education and proper parenting is, like anything else, a one-sided recipe for disaster.

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Ignoring the terrifying fact that it’s Friday the 13th and my yogurt this morning was clearly expired long before its November 26 sell by date (spooky, no?), the Internet had a pretty good week.  And by good week I mean I found lots of things that were interesting to me, and in the name of social capital, trust and altruism, I share them with you.  Aren’t you lucky?  Of course you are.

• Robert Scoble has an excellent post about how Twitter lists have become his main news source, essentially mitigating RSS and standard info consumption models completely.  I find this fascinating personally, because most of the really fresh news I get via Twitter, but I can’t see RSS being marginalized just yet.  I’ll need time to play with this, because it’s truly disruptive, as least as far as my workflows are concerned.
• Want an effective ward against the heavy omen of Friday the 13th?  Want to also tear up a little, but in a good way?  Watch this video of a dog welcoming home a US soldier from Afghanistan.
• Tim Burton animates the MoMA logo. Fantastic.
• Gartner estimates the worldwide smartphone market share.  In a nutshell: Apple grew YoY from 13% to 17%; RIM from 16% to 21%.  HTC grew from 4.5% to 6.5% and Samsung held on at 3%.  Nokia dipped from 42% to 39%.  As John Gruber says, now is a great time to recall the words of Steve Ballmer, only two years ago: “There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance.”
• Slate’s Michael Agger decided to have some fun with Google’s search box, and the results are both awkward and fascinating.  As Rafe over at RC3.org says, it’s a search engine confessional of sorts.
• Check out the designy barcodes appearing in Japan.
• How you can avoid an untimely death.  I particularly like #2:  “Never get on a 4-wheeler ATV, as they have produced more quadriplegics than anything else.”  It’s worth reading the whole list. (via kottke)
• Speaking of design, Apple has overtaken Nokia to claim the profit crown in the mobile phone industry.  MG Siegler has a great piece about Apple’s pursuit of profit rather than raw market share.  You should read it.
• The New Yorker’s Elizabeth Kolbert tears SuperFreakonomics authors Stephen Levitt and Stephen Dubner up one side and down the other on the pair’s geoengineering chapter of their latest book.  Ouch.
• A man, distracted by a low-flying pelican, drives his $1.6M Bugatti Veyron into a salt marsh.  Part of me died reading this.  (Thx to Chris for the heads-up)

(crosspost)

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