Matthew Lang avatar

Matthew Lang

Family guy and web developer

Paper writing tips from ...

... Kurt Harden.

Here's the first:

  1. Grab them by the … whatever will get their attention. Memo? Invert that triangle. “Start at the last page” as a client recently told me. “Our new product line is selling very well, with penetration in existing clients of 30% after the first year. But the _____ line is failing…” A paper? Get the most interesting quotation you can find, and place it right before the start of your paper. It’s okay, the person reading your paper wants to enjoy themselves. You will be rewarded for making the experience interesting.

— So you have to write a report/paper/memo by Cultural Offering

The desire and willingness to create things that genuinely help people is the only business plan and personal brand you need. With this, you can get started today. No fancy website or business cards needed.

— My Personal Brand by Patrick Rhone

No mention of domain names, icons, or even social networks. It just takes the need to create and help others.

I'm glad I came back to using Instapaper when I did. They've just introduced a new UI and now you can also highlight sections from what you're reading.

Assumptions about the Internet based services we use lead to the fact that only the more popular ones are catered to when it comes to subsequent tools being built.

Assumptions on the Internet are everywhere. It's in the networks that we can share articles to, the growing number of companies using Facebook as their sole Internet presence and in the ways that we can connect services together.

For someone like me it's pain in the backside.

There's a campaign at the moment to stop the development of greenbelt land in our town. The local council want to sell the land to developers to build a thousand more homes for our town. Trying to coordinate with other campaigners on this issue has proved difficult. The only point of contact I can find are on Facebook and even there they don't give an email address to contact them. The assumption here is that everyone has a Facebook account but that's just not the case.

Then there's the services that require you to register using an existing social network account without providing users with a chance to register with their email address. Assuming that we're all on once social network or another is a bad assumption to make and in the end it's only going to lose you potential users and money.

I make an assumption on this website with the sharing links at the bottom of each article. You can share to App.net or Twitter. I choose these because at the time I did have accounts on both, but now I only have an App.net account. Am I going to reduce the sharing options to just App.net? Definitely not, as I see that these are two of the quickest ways of sharing links now.

When compared to the assumptions that bigger companies and organisations have made about social network choice and prescence then my site doesn't seem so important, so I guess then that my assumptions are not too damaging to others. More of an inconvience really, but there are other ways of sharing my website.

Not everyone is connected in a way that we can be accessed on any of the more popular social networks. Some of us even choose to stay away from these in favour of reaching people directly through email or publishing updates to an RSS feed. The good thing about these is that they're the most open formats avaialble for the sharing and consumption of data. No one controls email or RSS feeds, they're free for everyone to use.

I'm more selective about the services and tools I use. I try to use services that provide open endpoints such as RSS so that I can connect services together. They don't depend soley on specific social networks and give me more of a choice. Choice is good, assumptions are bad.

Sticking with App.net

Many readers here will know of my support of the social platform, App.net, and how it has become a worthy alternative to other social platforms. It's a place where I hang out daily, watching conversations happening, taking part in them on the odd occasion and using the 256 character length posts to bash out my thoughts, opinions and ideas through out the day.

I wasn't particularly surprised by the news yesterday that the App.net team is having to scale back its number of employees and rely on contractors to maintain and support the App.net platform. The App.net team have been quiet of late and there hasn't been a visible enough uptake of new members for me to see that App.net platform is growing. It's not all bad news though, Dalton and Bryan have said they will continue running App.net indefinitely.

I've heard so many arguments that App.net doesn't have the user base to sustain growth and given the recent announcement from Dalton, it's hard to argue against this. The thing is though, it's still making enough money to sustain the platform, but this for me is the worrying part.

App.net started as a platform that required payment before you could create an account here. $36 per year is the cost. It's not much for many people, and there's even the option of paying monthly. It was this pay wall that guaranteed that there would be some sense of mediation of users coming onto the platform. If you were serious about joining you paid up. Dalton's recent post reads that hosting is covered by the renewal of paid accounts, but how much of the hosting costs are being used to support free accounts on the platform?

I want App.net to survive and continue to grow, but the free tier account has always been a sticking point. Accounts that don't contribute to the sustainability of the platform and their continued use of other features such as Broadcast means that they're using up part of the hosting of this platform while giving nothing in return.

I could be wrong about this and I don't have the numbers to prove my argument, but I would like to see the platform reducing the features that are on offer to free accounts and continue to add more value to paid and developer accounts. If these accounts are the ones that will sustain App.net in the future, then surely they must be the primary focus rather than building features for all in the hopes that some free tier accounts upgrade?

It's not all bad though, the App.net team have open sourced the Alpha client for the platform. It's from this point on that I hope that contributions made by the community will drive this social platform back into a more healthier state of sustainability and growth.

I love the community behind App.net. My timeline is a much more pleasant place for reading than any single day that I had when I was on Twitter. Interesting conversations and shared links provide a much better environment than being the one account in millions on Twitter.

I'll continue to post on App.net until the lights go out, which I hope is years away from now.