The Innovation Gang

By | November 22, 2011
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The AIA winners, Singapore Nov 2007

The past few weeks I’ve been interviewing and writing up the finalists for the Asian Innovation Awards and the Global Entrepolis awards, which are organized in part by my employer, The Wall Street Journal. It’s the third time I’ve done it, and while it’s great to interview them over the phone this was the first time I got to see all of them in the flesh.

The drive to innovate is a weird thing; if I had to identify one thing they’ve all got in common it’s that they’re all their own people. Not a blazing insight, I grant you, but they were characters in their own way, some quiet, some not so quiet, and it was frankly a pleasure to listen to their stories and then try to write them up.

Here are the WSJ.com stories (free access!) which appeared in Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal Asia:

“Innovator Finds Clever Way to Wash Water” (gold winner – Australia)

“Creating Empowerment Through Cow Dung” (silver winner – Bangladesh) 

“Rickshaws Drive Entrepreneurship” (bronze winner – India)

“GES Winner Stifles Bollywood Piracy” (GES winner – India) 

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Offended By Spit

By | November 22, 2011
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The truth about writing, especially comic writing, is that you’re always going to offend somebody. The trick is not to do it deliberately, but also, not to care when you do. Seinfeld’s The Boyfriend episode is a classic of the genre, mocking JFK assassination buffs (Stone’s JFK had just come out) with the spitting sequence. It caused such laughter in the studio audience they had to edit some of the laughter out, but still some folk were offended, and remain so. Like this commenter from a Seinfeld fan site I recently came across: 

There were lots of great elements in this show, but I found the JFK spoof material incredibly offensive. It’s one I always skip when I see it in syndication. It just seems like incredibly bad taste (way beyond Seinfeld bad taste) to be mocking the killing of an American president, especially one less than 40 years ago. I never, ever understood what was funny about those scenes.

I’m not saying such people are stupid to be offended, or too tightly coiled for Seinfeld. It’s just you always will offend people, whatever you write, but it shouldn’t stop you or alter your course. Fortunately for us, it didn’t stop Seinfeld.

Seinfeld: The Boyfriend – TV Squad

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Website Members Take Over Football Club

By | November 22, 2011
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A new model of football ownership? The BBC website reports that

Fans’ community website MyFootballClub has agreed a deal to take over Blue Square Premier outfit Ebbsfleet United.

The 20,000 MyFootballClub members have each paid £35 to provide a £700,000 takeover pot and they will all own an equal share in the club.

Members will have a vote on transfers as well as player selection and all major decisions.

What’s interesting is that the website has only been going since April. It has 50,000 members, 20,000 of them paying the registration fee. MyFootballClub was actually approached by nine of them clubs, none of them from the Premier League, before deciding on Ebbsfleet. The £700,000 was raised in 11 weeks.

I have no idea what the implications of this are. But given that the members/owners will now demand a say in the picking of the team, it could be more like the Israeli model I mentioned a few weeks back. Not everyone agrees it would work.

BBC SPORT | Football | My Club | Ebbsfleet United | Fans website agrees club takeover

The “Have I Got a Story For You” Trick

By | November 22, 2011
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I’m no fan of bad, sloppy PR, and to me there’s nothing quite as sloppy as pitching a product to a journalist s/he has already written about. Do these people not have any records at all? Do they have no idea of what coverage their product has already received?

I’ve been pitched two products in the past week that I have written about already in my WSJ.com column. OK, not everyone reads the WSJ, and not everyone reads the column, but it’s not exactly a backwater publication that would have not shown up in someone’s records, had they been keeping any.

First there was the Unotron washable keyboard, which I pretty much dedicated a whole column to a couple of years back (it shows up on the CollegeJournal with a search unotron wsj). In response to a request to the PR/expert source clearing house ProfNet a few days back I received a pitch from a PR guy which began

If you are looking for the latest technological advancement in computer keyboards, I may have your answer.

What surprised me here was that my column was copiously cited on the company’s own website.

Then there’s something called the Loc8tor, a tracking device I wrote about a few months back in another WSJ.com column. I just now received a pitch with the breathless subject line: “STORY IDEA: New RFID Tracking Device Finds Valuables with Directional Capabilities”:

I am contacting you regarding a new product story that will help your readers stay organized and find their valuables. 

The original column doesn’t show up high in the search engines if you look for loc8tor wsj but a reference to it clearly shows up in a link to Peter Morville of findability.org, whom I interviewed for the piece. Seems the PR company could use the product themselves to keep track of previous coverage of their client’s product.

(It’s only “new”, by the way, in the sense of newly available in the U.S.; the product’s been around for at least a year in the UK and elsewhere. The PR person involved clearly doesn’t have a particularly good database as my column has carried an Asian dateline for the past year, and my blog and webpage make clear I’m not U.S. based. Minor details, I grant you, but I feel sorry for the poor sap who’s paying the agency if he’s hoping for a well-targeted PR campaign.)

What’s telling, to me, in both of these cases, is that I had originally dealt with the companies themselves, not with their PR companies. In fact, I’m not sure either had PR companies working with them when I dealt with them. In other words, these companies have hired PR companies to go get coverage, who then go undo the positive work the company itself had done by pitching to the self-same guys who have already given them coverage.

I can understand, I suppose, this kind of thing happening. But it’s still sloppy, and clearly indicates that the PR company, when hired, does little or no research into what coverage the product has already received. Surely that would be the first thing you’d do, if only to see whether those publications or writers have already written about you might be worth cultivating for follow-up coverage down the track? At the very least, I guess I would assume you don’t want to alienate those people by showing you have no idea what they’ve been writing about?

PR note #273: When you get a new client, Google them.

The Power of Tiddly

By | November 22, 2011
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This week’s Loose Wire Service column, a service for print publications,  is on the TiddlyWiki, a piece of software I find myself coming back to from time to time:

This isn’t for everybody, but I’ve found myself recently going back to a little itsy bitsy piece of software that turns your browser into a notebook cum database.

It’s called TiddlyWiki, and it takes the two concepts — tiddlyness, as in smallness, and Wiki, as in simple editing software — about as far as you can take them. The result: a flexible piece of software that contains both the programming needed to run the thing and the information you put it into in one file.

This is how it works. You download the software from www.tiddlywiki.com, a site run by the TiddlyWiki’s creator, Jeremy Ruston. The file itself is just an HTML file, the same as most web pages you visit.

Inside that one file is all the code you need to start your own TiddlyWiki. Once open, the file has a title, a menu on the right and a couple of basic entries — called Tiddlies, in the trade — already open.

You can then add your own entries by clicking on “New Tiddly”. You can change the title and subtitle of the page by editing the corresponding Tiddly. It’s both nerdy and intuitive: You quickly learn that it’s possible to convert plain text to bold by adding you add two apostrophes before and after the text you want emboldened.

To highlight text in yellow add two @-signs before and after the text. And so on. To edit a Tiddly just double click anywhere in its text; when you’re done, hit Control + Enter, or else click on the Done button.

The power of the TiddlyWiki is, in my view, in how you can organize your entries. You can add tags, or labels, to each entry, adding new ones on the go or from a pull down list of existing tags. You can then see at a glance what entries you’ve got with those tags. You can see your entries in chronological order, or alphabetically. Or you can search through the entries looking for specific words.

Why might you want something like this? Well, there are a number of advantages:

You have a project and you want to keep all the data in one place. Or you want to create small databases of, say, recipes or contacts for a specific project.

You don’t want to splash out for expensive database or outliner software.

You like something like EverNote, but you can never find what you’re looking for.

You crave simplicity. TiddlyWiki is not as fancy as most programs, but that doesn’t mean it’s not powerful.

You’re using both Macs and Windows computers (or Linux); TiddlyWiki works on most browsers, and of course doesn’t care what operating system it’s on.

You like trying something new, but don’t want to get a headache. Tiddly, as they say, ain’t fiddly.

You want something you can put on a USB stick and carry with you, and use on any computer without installing something.

You want to create a quick and dirty website (TiddlyWiki can be uploaded and used as a website, though it’s not overly elegant; as all the data is in one HTML file, it may slow loading the page.

You like programs that are always improving themselves; a passionate user base is always coming up with improvements and add-ons. A great way to waste an evening.

I messed around with it a couple of years back and enjoyed it, but bumped up against its limitations. My main problem was that adding too much to a TiddlyWiki makes it unwieldy. This time around, instead of adding everything to one TiddlyWiki, I made different ones for each specific project.

Keeping the entries smaller and the number of entries to 20 or so made it much easier. It got me through a tricky project, I have to say.

Downsides? Some people swear by the TiddlyWiki, but I suspect it’s the kind of thing you play with, and perhaps come back to from time to time, as the mood and need take you.

I wouldn’t recommend it for everyone either; some of us just need things to be a bit more straightforward than TiddlyWiki presently is. But for the rest of you, this is a great way to try something a bit different and see if it fits a need you have.

The Jakarta Post – The Journal of Indonesia Today