R.M

RdotM is no more

RdotM.com is now robbiemitchell.com

A few months ago I received this unsolicited email:

Hi

My name is David […], a website developer from Queensland, Australia.  I am writing to let you know that I am currently offering the domain name RobbieMitchell.com for purchase.

I would be willing to offer you RobbieMitchell.com below market value at the rate of only $290 US. This domain could be used for email purposes, to redirect to your current website or even to track specific marketing campaigns.  It could also be extremely helpful in building search engine rankings for this specific keyword.  This would be a powerful marketing tool while also creating valuable type-in traffic to your existing website.

If you would like to purchase this domain name or have any questions please reply to this message as soon as possible to avoid losing this rare opportunity to a competitor. I do not expect this domain to be offered for sale again.

Thanks for taking the time to read this message and I look forward to hearing from you soon.

Your sincerely
David […]
[…]

I replied:

Hi David,

Thanks for writing.  I would be happy to purchase the domain in full for $30.

Robbie

I never heard back.

This past Friday, however, I looked up the domain out of curiosity and found that it didn’t resolve.  It was available. For $10.  So of course I took it.  (It just means the old owner didn’t renew it; guess there weren’t many competitors out there after all.)

I didn’t expect to use it right away, but feedback over the weekend swayed me to ditch rdotm (R.M, get it?) in favor of the full name.  A few DNS entries and 301 redirects later, here we are.

Use Your Words

Sometimes you just want to send up a flare:  tweet a song from Shazam; post a photo from your road trip; embed a YouTube video you just found.  I get that. I do that. That’s the joy of microblogging.

But, you know, that doesn’t need to be the only way.

Friends, if we’re going to grow up, we’re going to have to start using our words.  Describing things simply as “awesome” and “ridiculous” and “amazing” is not going to cut it if we’re going to help each filter through the masses of music and photos and exhibits and websites and phones and news and Tweets and contests whizzing by us every day.

I’m the first to admit that I overuse these shortcut phrases, even purposefully.  I have as much room for improvement as anyone.

Word of mouth referrals are just as important as ever, but we have these tools that make it terribly easy to shotgun our commentary and recommendations without putting much thought into the other end.  We need real adjectives, real nouns, and less hyperbole. We need calibrated, honest assessments of songs and YouTube videos and tech reviews.  We need meaningful context.

You want me to buy concert tickets?  Tell me why you like this artist.  Tell me your favorite songs, and what about them to you love, and how they make you feel.  Tell me about the first time you heard it.  Take the time to tell me something that makes it real.

We can do this.  We can use technology to communicate effectively.

OneTwoThree Go.

How to use Twitter

This is pasted from numerous emails I’ve sent to friends and family in the past year.  Bear in mind that the best way to understand what Twitter is and how to use it is to… start using it.  Feel free to chime in with additions, clarifications, and criticisms.

This is not how to use Twitter well or strategically or without annoying you and everyone around you. This is about what to do once you sign up and find yourself staring at a clean slate.

Related posts:

• My take on Twitter
• Email from my mamma
• FETHR, an open-source Twitter protocol
• Robbie 2.0

How to Use Twitter

There are three basic ways of communicating on Twitter:

1. Public messages aimed at no one
2. Public messages that reply to someone or mention one or more people
3. Private messages sent to one person.

The most basic way to use Twitter, without even signing up, is to look at people’s Twitter individual accounts via a Web browser.  That gets old, though, and belies a chief benefit: aggregation.

Once you create an account and start “following” (aka “listening to”) people, you can stop visiting their individual account pages and just visit login to your own dashboard. The tweets from everyone you follow will be collected in one place for you to sift through.  Cool, huh?

To make things even easier, you can download a Twitter application (“app”) and run it on your computer.  Twitter apps tend to provide a better user interface (“UI”) and have all sorts of features, like built-in replying, search, etc.  You can even install a Twitter app on your cell phone.  I recommend specific apps later in this post.

Now, on to communicating.

1. The default tweet is public and aimed at no one in particularly.  Think of it as a beacon you emit for all to hear/read. Or, if you’re into journalism, think of yourself as a tiny, personal publisher.
2. You can address messages to me (aka, “mention me”) by putting @superstrong somewhere in the message.  It’s just as public, but I will get notified especially that a message was aimed at me.  There are two ways to address me:
   • If you are replying to me, begin the message with the @superstrong, like, “@superstrong Is this thing on?”
   • If you just want to mention me in some way, you can put it anywhere and it will be understood that you just wanted to include me.  e.g., “Getting a Twitter refresher from @superstrong”.

My Twitter app will bring my attention to both types of “mentions”.  The difference is how other people’s Twitter apps interpret the message.  If you start your tweet by mentioning me, people who follow you but don’t follow me will not see it in their Twitter feeds.  Why?  Because from their perspective, it’s an irrelevant conversation.  (Everyone can still see it if they look at your feed on the Web.  We’re talking just about how Twitter apps filter information for people.)  If, alternatively, you mention me anywhere else in the message, everyone who follows you will see it.

So, let’s say you write a mesage like “@stranger Thanks for the help!” I would not see that in my Twitter app, because I don’t follow username “stranger”.  The distinction helps me to see only tweets relevant to my life when receiving feeds through a Twitter application, and especially if I’m having some people’s Tweets sent directly to my phone as text messges (only a handful).

3. You can send private (“direct”) messages to me, which is similar to texting my cell phone or sending me an email.  Although your Twitter app should should take care of the syntax for you, you can manually direct a message to someone by typing “d [@username] message…”.  Note that the person will not receive your direct message (“DM”) unless they follow you.  Plain-old “replies” or “mentions” (see above) are a nice way of getting someone’s attention if you want to address them and they don’t follow you.

Twitter applications

I’m on a Mac and iPhone and use Tweetie for both.  On Windows PCs, I hear good things about TweetDeck, also available for the iPhone.  For Blackberry, I used Twitterberry.

Twitter Text (SMS)

So far I have only talked about using Twitter via a Web browser or an application.  There’s a third way you can interact with it: SMS, aka text message.  In fact, Twitter started as a way for people to communicate with each other via their phones, which is why the service limits each tweet to the same 140-character limit as a regular text message.

By default, Twitter will not send tweets to your phone.  You can enable basic interaction with your phone by going to “Devices” in your Twitter settings and registering your phone.  From there you can also decide what hours are OK for Twitter to send you text messages.

At that point, you can send tweets from your phone, but you won’t receive any.

To receive tweets on your phone, enable “Device updates” for each account one at a time.  Currently, the only way I know to do this do this by viewing each person’s account via the Web browser and enabling it.

Warner Music Group: Still Blowing It

I just discovered that the funny video of a boy super-dancing to “Low” has been removed due to YouTube’s autobots.  YouTube’s been around for 4.5 years and music labels are still scratching their heads about this Webby Tubes Music Downstreaming thing.

Here’s the deal:  YouTube has a Content ID system*.  Labels can submit all their music, the system will create a blueprint of every song, and whenever something pops up online that matches a blueprint, the system can act.  (I’m told by an ESPN executive that YouTube is creating a similar system for videos, if they haven’t already.)

When the Content ID system finds a match, it can do any number of things:

• Remove the video
• Overlay a transluscent banner at the bottom that contains links to iTunes and Amazon
• Other things, like send out an alert internally (just guessing on this one)
• Nothing

Warner Music Group content is automatically removed because the label hasn’t settled on a licensing deal with YouTube.  I don’t know whether WMG instructs YouTube to remove the content or YouTube removes it proactively to avoid a lawsuit.  Either way, they’re missing the point:  in the absence of advertising revenue, WMG could and should be making use of these streams by embracing them.  The opposite of this is not neutral, it’s aggressively negative.

Here’s what I said a few months ago following an article specifically about WMG’s YouTube content.  Is it that outlandish?

WMG, here’s a proposal.

Google’s Content ID tool should identify potentially offending tracks but then simply flag them internally, not remove them. When a video reaches a predetermined benchmark (e.g., total views and/or exponential growth), it notifies the label so someone can take a look. If it’s girl playing a cover on a webcam, make sure the Content ID system is overlaying a link to your artist’s iTunes and Amazon page like it should, then contact her and send her and a friend a free concert ticket, because she’s generating enormous interest in and referral linkage to your artist. The last thing you should do is have a video like that removed from YouTube.

If it’s a slideshow that someone used as an excuse to post the full song, yes, take the song down. (But recognize that you probably have the full song on your own official YouTube video anyway, and if you don’t, maybe you should, and your audience just did you a favor. Use the Content ID system to automatically overlay links to iTunes and AmazonMP3 and move on.)

Instead of removing flagrant violations, why not have the system limit the video to 30 seconds like imeem does?

And if the response is, “we don’t have time for this”, then you don’t have time to run your business.

And again following a more recent article about YouTube revenue:

Yes, making money on a per-stream basis is elusive, but not the value of eyeballs seeing your content.  This sounds more like a problem of classification: perhaps TV networks should treat the Web content as a marketing expense rather than the product itself.

Sound crazy?  Remember that Transformers cartoons and comic books were designed in part to sell action figures, and soap operas were originally sponsored and produced by soap manufacturers as a vehicle for product placement.

Theoretically an ad-supported pay-per-stream model could work, and I’m surprised I haven’t seen at least one company experiment with 15-second ads at the beginning of each song.

* Side note: RRR applied to be in the Content ID system and was rejected because YouTube didn’t believe or understand that we own our music. No appeals process, no contact information, just, “No.”

My Take On Twitter

Twitter = Talking

Almost every week I encounter a person in my life who feels he doesn’t understand Twitter—not that there’s anything wrong with that.  “I don’t get it”, she huffs.  Or “What’s the point?” or “I don’t want to tell the world what I’m doing at all times.”  Inevitably, I feel a strange compulsion to explain the service, hastily rattling off how it works and how I use it and how I’ve benefitted from plugging in.

The best entry-level analogy I can make to Twitter is office chatter—the overheard office banter, the 2-minute cubicle doorway interactions, the let’s-stand-in-the-hallway-with-coffee weekend recaps. Some companies are full of it, with open offices, ping-pong tables, gchat, happy hour, you name it. Others have a more, shall we say, “subdued” culture, which was the case when I worked at the Harvard Kennedy School. A few professors spoke casually, but it was the exception; most kept their heads down in the hallway and restricted interaction to within formal structures:  workshops, e-mail, manuscripts, teaching, and presentations.

Talking Is Important

Theoretically we can all work from home and run a company together, maybe even have daily videoconferences, but it comes with a cost.  Ricardo Hausmann, a charismatic economics professor I worked with, once referred to “office spillover” as a critical, intangible reason for why collocation works so well.

Similarly, in “The Tricke List”, Rands explained one of his five standing items: the random hallway chat.

Having a random hallway chat usually isn’t going to be a career changer. 9 out of 10 of those conversations are lightweight, but those are 9 conversations I wouldn’t have had otherwise. Plus, it’s hallway visibility, and in a gig where 90% of the days are spent holed up in meetings, that’s time well spent. And there’s the 10th conversation where I learn something huge:

Wait, the project is HOW FAR behind?

Hold it, you’re thinking about QUITTING?

By choosing to create a moment where I leave my structured day to have a random conversation, I’m creating informational opportunity, and while these moments may appear to have low initial return on time investment, you’re playing a numbers game. You’re counting on the fact that, over time, over many moments, you’re creating unexpected potential.

Twitter re-creates office spillover among endless groups of disconnected people by enabling and encouraging conversations with a higher tolerance for fluff.  At first glance that looks useless; then again, I know 10 professors who think your mid-day hallway chatter is a waste of time.  Who’s right?

Kickin’ It With The World

How many of your truly good friends do you work with?  Probably not many. Chat and e-mail keep us connected; Twitter takes this a step further by allowing you to listen to (and if you’re lucky, interact with) people you would never dream of knowing, let alone work with.  Shaq, John Mayer, John Gruber, Merlin Mann, the CEO of Zappos, JetBlue… on and on. You get to kick it with all these people you admire or just think are hilarious, and best of all, it’s free, and it’s mobile.

Twitter doesn’t just bridge the gap, it adds a new dimension to the conversation.  Take e-mail.  This post I’m writing right now—to whom should I send it?  Which of my friends will care?  Blogging bypasses that burden of choice and publishes my thoughts beyond my existing network, to whomever is listening asynchronously via Google and social media.  It turns me into a publisher with instant, global reach.  In one sense, Twitter does the same thing to chat, but on a smaller level—hence the term micro-blogging.  The benefit is not that I’m writing, but that others are writing, too, and I get to listen to them.

It’s What You Make It

I’ll end with three things I tell people first:  one, you can do whatever you want with it.  No one said you have to describe what you’re watching on TV.  Two, the more you use it, the more its value (and alternate real-world analogies) will reveal itself.  Three, having your actual friends on it is an important part of integrating it into your life, and it’s also way more fun that way.

Previously: Robbie 2.0

E-mail From My Mamma*

It took a while, but my family—including some extended relatives—is tuned in.

My personal cell is dead. (Just need to charge it.)  I miss your twitters! I wish I was twittering myself - so many observations lately.  Like that the cherry blossom trees are… just trees.  Don’t know why they make such a fuss over them, unless it’s just a tourist draw (for all of the 10 days they’re in bloom).  Dayton-area festivals were much better because they always involved food, right?  (Sauerkraut, strawberries, Italian, Greek…)

I called you, then saw you had called earlier.  Try me again!

From the start I hoped this would all be a convenient way for family to stay in touch passively by listening in, so that when we do talk on the phone and e-mail it’s less “I have no idea what’s going on in your life!” and more “So how was your Hot Coffee live show?”  I understand the knee-jerk reaction to friending your parents on Facebook or bringing up things you posted online (I’d hate it, too, if I were 16), but once you get beyond the artificial uncoolness or secrecy of it all, it just makes life easier.

Also, turns out my grandmother nana actually prefers e-mail to phone calls because it’s so much easier to communicate asynchronously given our busy lives on opposite coasts.  Don’t think she’s hip to the Twit, though.

* cf. Postcards From Yo Mamma

Pandora + Tunecore = Discovery, Faster

A slightly edited version of an e-mail I sent to Pandora’s bizdev team yesterday.

UPDATE: I also forwarded the e-mail to Kevin Seal (Pandora exec. producer), and he replied with a nice, informative e-mail about their plans for the music submission process and their philosophy on curation and access.

Dear Pandora,

My name is Robbie Mitchell and I am co-founder of a production house & record label that creates educational rap music.  I’ve also been a Pandora listener since fall 2005.

A friend just used Twitter to announce her excitement about a new band she discovered on MySpace; I saw the tweet, googled the band, and listened to a couple songs.  It dawns on me that this is a comically inefficient way to discover music.  Similarly, earlier tonight a producer and I read a music review at All Music and wondered aloud about the value of a critical review.  Why do we need sites like All Music and Pitchfork to make critical suggestions that have nothing to do with my tastes, however uninspired or embarrassing they may be?  Twitter+MySpace?  This is all so 20th century!

For my music company, we use Tunecore as an intermediary to submit music to the online stores, particularly iTunes and AmazonMP3.  It dawns on me that Pandora should be listed among the options that producers have for using Tunecore to distribute music, with an appropriate fee, so that Pandora can then serve as the first stop for potential customers exploring new music.  If we can trust Pandora to have music hot off the press from every group on MySpace trying to make it big—by making it easier to submit music to Pandora and get it “sequenced”—it will be a more powerful tool and will help flatten the world of online music discovery and sales.

In the end, relying on singular sources of information, including trusted friends, is an ineffective way for most people to discover art; my tastes are unique to me, even if others share some of them, and a significant share of exposure and purchase decisions are driven by pre-existing commercial success.  We already know Pandora’s “genome” method is a powerful and reliable system for discovering new songs, but people still send each other MySpace links because we still rely on personal recommendations—there is no clear alternative.

Bottom line:  I think Pandora has the potential to be the first place people go to discover new music for themselves, not just a place—much like IMDB, but even better because the recommendations are based on “song DNA” and relevant social-networking features instead of commercial success or ratings or critical reviews.  (The iTunes “Genius” is in the same vein, but Apple will always be geared toward music sales, while Pandora focuses on music exploration.)

Recommendation:  Make it easy to submit music to Pandora automatically, charge whatever fee you need, and make sure songs get sequenced in a timely manner.

Thanks for everything you do!

Basecamp: Task Lists vs. Due Dates

UPDATE: 37 Signals has now added due dates to Basecamp To Do items.

I’m reposting this from a 37Signals Basecamp forum, where I originally submitted it as a comment.  If you use Basecamp you’ll know what I’m talking about; if not, watching the To Do tour video will provide some context. (Because of the Basecamp context, I used “To Do” as an proper noun and avoided hyphenation.)

The question at hand, and the one most often vocalized by users, is why Basecamp does not enable users to assign due dates to tasks.  For years 37Signals has stated flatly that they do not plan to add this functionality.  Instead, they encourage people to use Milestones (major dates comprising groups of tasks) when they need a due date.  Traditional-minded project managers complain that this muddles the definition of milestone.

@robwal This is a shot at defending the absence of due dates on To Do items, and it is in part a continuation of @Don McDonald.  It is not directed at anyone in particular, and naturally, this may have nothing to do with 37S’s actual reasons for resisting it.

In short, my theory is that Basecamp uses To Do lists instead of due dates, that these systems are mutually exclusive, that the former promotes (demands?) a more deliberate approach to task management, and that 37Signals would rather develop the app around a single, preferred work flow than support two different worldviews.

An Alternative

I assume people want dates so they can then sort by date and decide what to do next, that this is because people are staring at a mountain of tasks they’ve added over time and trying to decide what is urgent and what isn’t, and that the volume of tasks and daily activities are so large that deciding what to do just by looking at the task list is excessively cumbersome.  I’m going to do something radical and suggest that perhaps that’s a problem.

I like the Morning Scrub that Rands advocates:

By taking a deep breath and considering your entire day, I’m attempting to ditch all the bright’n’shininess and gather perspective: “What is going to matter today?” With this rough priority scale in mind, I do a complete scrub of the to-do list. Yeah, the whole thing. If you can’t get through this list in 5 uninterrupted minutes, your list is either too long or you’re bad at scrubbing. Don’t worry about that yet.

The purpose of the Morning Scrub is to land each task into one of three buckets:

1. Today. This task must be completed today.
2. Later. Not today. Later.
3. Never. Yeah, I’m never going to do this task. It’s gone.

Bam.  Create three (actually, two) lists, and start reordering.  Need more lists?  Create more—but remember, keep it simple.  Maybe you start each Monday by creating a list for the week and moving things into it.  Every day, you drag things into the “Today” list.

Coming at it from a GTD angle, if I discover that certain tasks are not leaving the “Today” list for days, they might need to be broken down into simpler tasks, and maybe even built into a milestone.  (Not only that, but they aren’t truly urgent, which is a different matter altogether.)  “Finish article” or “Send RFP to Frank” might look like tasks that need due dates, but they might actually be smaller milestones that rely on things like “proof article” or “double-check RFP budget with marketing”.  Or, maybe these are correctly defined as tasks, but I am not blocking off time to get things done throughout the normal course of a day.  Due dates will solve neither problem.

Incidentally, if you start using the task lists this way, then adding the date to the task description—as some have suggested—suddenly becomes useful.  Just drag it into your “Today” list the morning of the due date.  Bonus:  you are now aware that it’s due today by conscious effort as opposed to being blindly reminded in the morning.

Reminders

One might respond, “OK, but some things are really just reminders, and I should be able to create a reminder and forget about it, not have it stare at me for two weeks.” Fair:  put it in your calendar, along with your meetings, time blocks, and holidays.  “But then the reminder is no longer tied to a milestone.” Just tag your reminder (e.g., “Check on Bob’s code #softlaunch”).  “But that creates unnecessary extra work.  I’m still not convinced.”

Well…

37 Signals Philosophy / Experience

Theoretically Basecamp’s task lists and due dates can coexist, but in practice I imagine they are mutually exclusive.  Think about it:  you are either going to run your day according to
(a) what the system tells you is due via hourly alerts or daily auto-sort, or
(b) what your eyes tell you via consistent review and list management

Choosing user-managed lists over due dates seems to be a fundamental choice on their part and one they are not willing to compromise on easily.  Milestones get alerts and calendar entries because they need it; all else is a constant churn of tasks that requires your attention.  A group of tasks, broken into lists, requires a different mindset—different from hourly alerts, and different from “This is due now!” reminders popping up out of the sky without conscious thought—but maybe the 37S guys know what they’re doing.

Highrise

I suspect Highrise tasks have due dates instead of lists because there aren’t milestones binding them together; the application has a narrower focus and the task management philosophy reflects this.

Robbie 2.0

I’ve launched an effort to establish an independent online space for myself outside of Facebook.  Rather than generate new content there, I’ll post it to my own online real-estate and have Facebook import it automatically.

To help with this I’m experimenting with two new toys: Tumblr and Twitter. Whereas typical blogging is a format for publishing in long-form, Tumblr is short-form, and Twitter is micro-form—limited to 140 characters. Both Twitter and Tumblr allow people to follow others, meaning you can decide to listen in automatically on what certain people post without them necessarily needing to listen back. (Imagine one-way friendships in Facebook!)

Accordingly, rather than e-mail selected—often random or rotating—groups of people whenever I encounter something they might want to know about or when I have a random thought, Tumblr and Twitter enable me to post thoughts, pictures, links, and other resources to a public space, more like emitting a beacon than contacting anyone directly. Whoever wants to stay informed can do so a few different ways: (1) by visiting the websites directly, (2) by joining the services and following me, and (3) by subscribing to the RSS feed each service generates.

Also, Tumblr allows you to integrate your blog into your own domain name seamlessly and easily, which explains http://rdotm.com

These are interesting communication vehicles on their own, but they also fit nicely with Facebook, which for me remains more of a static presence that happens to hold photo albums. In Facebook I have set it up to have my Tumblr entries imported as Notes and my Twitter updates updated in the Twitter application within my profile.

I elected not to have Twitter update my actual Facebook status because, at least for now, it seems like overkill to generate newsfeed items every time I change my Twitter status

Onward.

UPDATE (June 2009): When I first explained this blog to friends, I spoke more about wanting to have control over what was floating around about me on the Web more than staking out digital property.  Turns out Anil Dash wrote a more complete explanation of that reasoning back in Dec. 2002 in a post called “privacy through identity control”.  Worth the read.