Work Wanted

This is a small call for help. I am looking for work, and need your help.

Contract or permanent. Preferably (but not exclusively or even at all) telecommute. I can code, design, architect software, consult in any of these (and dev process/team issues) and teach a variety of Java, OO Design and web development topics, and would be happy to do any/all of these. I additionally have some experience doing system administration work. I work in Linux/Unix environments and know next-to-nothing about Windows.

I've done web stuff, and loads of backend "heavy lifting" coding where reliability, scalability, etc. are important. I am not good at quick'n'dirty. Skeptical of the value of buzzwords and big-arse frameworks.

Check out my "business" website for more details about me and what I've done in the past.

R (as they say) "highly neg".

If you have anything suitable, or know of anything that fits, please drop me a line.

I will be in Cape Town and environs next week, so an ideal time to get together and chat about possibilities and opportunities.

Guy Kawasaki Finally Catching-up with Me?

In “Is Advertising Dead?” Guy Kawasaki finally reaches the place I was at in "Why Advertising is Broken", posted back in July.

Welcome, Guy!  Its going to be very interesting to see how this story plays out.

Why Advertising is Broken

Brad Feld started it with his Three Constituencies post.  Stan James followed up with some very interesting insights on the model set-up by Brad.  Go! Read them; I'll wait here.

In thinking about this model and all it implies, I started drawing a diagram to keep the value-flows straight in my head, and suddenly something I've been mulling over for some time popped clear in my mind:  Why Interruptive Advertising is Dead.

For awhile, now I have held it as an article of faith that interruptive advertising is dead, just the body hasn't stopped moving yet.  (And if you think the Death Throes of the RIAA/MPAA business model has been messy and ugly, you probably ain't seen nothin' yet!)  For example, I never see popups (very interruptive stuff!) because Firefox blocks them with the preferences I have set.  The Adblock/AdblockPlus plugins block most other advertising that might reach me, and the recently-installed Flashblock plugin catches the remainder.  Do I hate adverts?  You bet!  I find them consistently irritating, irrelevant to my purposes, intrusive and obnoxious.  I've yet to find any exceptions.

Ya, ya!  We've all heard the bullshit: "Advertising informs you about products and product choices..."

Well, if there's something I want - a new house, a new car, some food, a holiday, a PC - I go out and shop for it.  Then I'm still not interested in adverts because they lack the substance I need to make a buy decision.

With the recent availability of Explorer 7beta3 (if you are so hooked into MS products that you simply can't give them up) every major browser now has ad-blocking.

What about TV?

Yes.  What about TV?  Its mostly boring and irrelevant.  The programming is mostly apalling, the news banal.  I doubt whether I watch an hour of TV a week any more.  I'm getting the content I want elsewhere.  If there is the occasional show I want to watch, chances are I'll timeshift it anyway and skip the ads there, too.

I truly believe that interruptive advertising is dead.  Permission-based advertising, and something I'll call Entertainment-based advertising, though is a whole new bundle of opportunities!

My diagram, based completely on Stan's blog explains why:

See the problem?  All around the value chain there is a fair exchange of value given and received (or something like it.)  Except when we come to the advertiser's relationship with the consumer.  One way only.  No wonder most of us resent and loath ads.

Thank you Brad and Stan for paving the way to this understanding of precisely why Interruptive Advertising is Broken.  The fact is that your interrupting me is a form of force: you believe you have to force your content onto me since I probably wouldn't want it otherwise.  And you're right!  I wouldn't.  I don't.  You give me nothing in return.

The truth is that interruptive marketing has always has been broken.  It's only recently that we consumers are in a position to do something about it, and we're doing so with a vengeance!

"There is no such thing as a problem without a gift for you in its hands"
- Richard Bach, "Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah"

There's a hell of a lot of opportunity in getting beyond the "need to interrupt", too, and it hinges on the advertiser giving back fair-value to the consumer in turn, but this post is already too long.

Goodbye (again!) to Flash

Finally I got pissed-off enough to remove Flash from all my PCs.  For a long, long time I resisted installing Flash, because all I had ever seen was annoying animated ads that bypassed my Adblock and Image-download restrictions through the use of Flash.  Then, along came broadband, and a few things worth watching on YouTube and a couple of other places.

So having had Flash installed and enabled in my browsers for a couple of months, now, I have come full circle back to my original position: It is just not worth it.  For the one or two worthwhile videos or whatever that I want to watch I can manually re-enable Flash.  For the rest I say , "Away with You, Worthless Rubbish."