We’ve seen a lot of articles about the negative effects of social networks this year. And yes, I’ve even written a few of those. So it was refreshing to read Roxane Gay’s What Twitter does — a reflection on the positive side of social networks:

Social networking does not offer a universal panacea, but it is something far more significant than “constant self-promotion.” The bonds of this community, at least the one I have found, are sprawled and unruly, but these bonds are not merely virtual. I travel all the time and wherever I go, I meet people with whom I am acquainted online. There may be initial awkwardness, but always, always, there is familiarity. We may not know each other but we know something of each other. We are a little less alone. Sometimes, the change technology brings is simple, intimate, and still significant.

One of the main criticisms against social media is that it fosters superficial relationships. Roxane’s point is that knowing a few superficial things about someone is better than knowing nothing, because it gives you a head start on a possible friendship.

Earlier today I delivered a talk called “How to build an audience in 743 difficult steps” at WordCamp Cape Town. This is a written version of the core points from the talk.

The biggest question every writer asks when they start publishing online is, “How do I get people to read my stuff?” There are many answers to this question, and these answers are usually now referred to as “content marketing”. Proposed methods run the gamut of SEO and Marketing advice, from back-linking and infographic making to the perfect way to write headlines (“People love lists!”).

This is a story about deciding to take a route that avoids most of these traditional content marketing methods. It’s a story of how a struggling blog with an insignificant number of readers has become not only a source of great joy and expression for me, but also a source of non-insignificant income. This is definitely not a story about how to get to 1 million page views a month. It’s a story about how to make your page views count.

Why write, anyway?

We should start at the beginning. Why write and publish online? It’s a lot of work and the payoff doesn’t always seem very clear. So why do it? I believe there are two main reasons for maintaining a personal site (and publishing there regularly).

First, it’s an excellent way to practice what Clive Thompson calls The art of public thinking:

The process of writing exposes your own ignorance and half-baked assumptions. I often don’t realize what I don’t know until I’ve started writing, at which point my unanswered questions and lazy, autofill thinking becomes obvious.

I’ve found this to be 100% true. Often, when I don’t understand a topic, I’ll just start writing about it, and in doing so the areas that need clarification start to crystalize. I also often start writing about something I think I understand well, but as I’m writing it becomes clear that I have huge knowledge/experience gaps somewhere. So I go away and figure it out before finishing the piece.

Second, your personal site is your resume. Many people have written about the importance of owning your identity, but I think Mitch Joel sums it up best in The New Resume:

Resumes have transformed from these static white pages into three dimensional, real-time personas that live, breathe, share and connect. Nothing will impress more than an individual who has taken the time to craft and share their perspectives about either the industry that they serve or what inspires them.

I’ve written quite a bit about the idea of work as platform, and owning your identity — separate from where you currently work — is a crucial component of that.

Let’s build an audience!

So those are the two main reasons I started this site. I wanted to get the benefits of public thinking, I wanted to have a record of my thoughts, and I wanted to do it in a way that’s hopefully interesting enough for others to enjoy as well. With those goals in mind, I was ready to go. I basically went off and did a whole lot of this:

Unfortunately, as anyone who has tried starting blog knows, “if you build it, they will come” is a big fat lie. Instead, this started happening with increasing frequency:

So, instead of happily “building an audience”, I started each day clearing out angry comments, and then walking around like this for the rest of the day:

Once that happens — once things suddenly don’t go according to plan — the lure of the easy can easily get you. Instead of focusing on providing quality content, the shortcuts that you’d vowed you’d never take suddenly become very attractive. Instead of automatically trashing those incessant emails about backlinking and infographic creation and paid content creation, you start reading them and before long you start considering all the ugly SEO tricks you’ve publicly scorned. And before you know it, your site looks like this:

Source: How to get more likes on Facebook

This is a dangerous place to be, and I’ve been there more than once. There have been many times where I’ve been on the verge of just stopping and shutting the site down, because I couldn’t see the use. Yet every time I came close to closing up shop, one question kept coming up in my mind: Why are we so unwilling to work hard for the things that we want? And then I saw someone articulate that thought perfectly…

The long, hard, stupid way (3 lessons)

I came across the idea of the long, hard, stupid way in a brilliant talk by Frank Chimero. He describes an episode of the TV show Treme where chef David Chang describes his cooking philosophy:

Just because we’re a casual restaurant, doesn’t mean we don’t hold ourselves to fine dining standards. We try to do things the right way. That usually means doing things the long, hard, stupid way.

Go ahead and think about a time when you learned to do something really difficult. Maybe it was learning to ride a skateboard, figuring out a new math equation, or debugging your first piece of code. Do you remember the strain, the frustration, and the countless failures? And do you also remember the enormous satisfaction you felt as you slowly mastered that task? Do you remember how doing it the hard way carried with it not only the benefits of learning that skill, but also many tangential thoughts or experiences that sparked new passions or interests?

When we do things the hard way, we invest in ourselves in the best possible way. We kick off an endless cycle of learning and mastery that helps us grow and lead fulfilling lives of purpose. When we take shortcuts, we become mere pretenders. We learn how to play the part, but there is no substance or continued growth. The instant gratification makes us build the house of cards ever higher, which brings anxiety about the whole thing coming tumbling down. Why would we shortchange ourselves like that?

Cal Newport nailed it when he said, “There is no avoiding the deliberate strain of real improvement.” If you want to become a better writer, read more and publish more. If you want to learn to design/code/fly, watch fewer episodes of Downton Abbey and practice the things that don’t come easy. And if you really want more Twitter followers, make and share things that are awesome, and be patient.

So what does this mean for online publishing? Over time I’ve learned 3 important lessons that have formed the foundation of how I write Elezea, and what I want this site to be.

The first lesson is Steven Pressfield’s timeless advice in The Most Important Writing Lesson I Ever Learned:

Nobody — not even your dog or your mother — has the slightest interest in your commercial for Rice Krispies or Delco batteries or Preparation H. Nor does anybody care about your one-act play, your Facebook page or your new sesame chicken joint at Canal and Tchopotoulis.

It isn’t that people are mean or cruel. They’re just busy.

Nobody wants to read your shit.

The thing is, once you realize that no one cares about the stuff you write, it’s actually quite liberating. It’s at that point that you realise that writing is a simple transaction between you and your readers. They have time and attention — which is more valuable than ever — and you have to provide content that is worthy of that time and attention. Otherwise we’re just wasting people’s time, and they certainly won’t stick around for that. No matter how many times I read it, I still love this Paul Ford quote from 10 Timeframes:

If we are going to ask people, in the form of our products, in the form of the things we make, to spend their heartbeats on us, on our ideas, how can we be sure, far more sure than we are now, that they spend those heartbeats wisely?

Remember the transaction between you and your readers, and make sure that when they pay you with their time and attention, they’re getting something worthy in return. But wait… how do I know if something is worthy…?

The second lesson I learned is that not everything is worthy of people’s attention. Content creation is becoming increasingly robotic and algorithmic, so instead of thinking about how people spend their heartbeats, we’re thinking about how to get them to click on things, regardless of what’s behind that click. We know that Yahoo tests more than 45,000 combinations of headlines and images every five minutes on its home page. We also know that The Huffington Post will serve different versions of a page to a couple of random groups and, after five minutes, the best headline will be selected. That sounds really smart, and they’ve obviously been extremely successful at generating traffic, but that approach is missing two key components. It’s missing what Merlin Mann refers to as Obsession times Voice.

Obsession is that thing that people want you to shut up about. The thing that wakes you up at night, the minuscule detail that you can’t stop thinking about. What is that thing that you just can’t let go of? That’s your obsession.

Voice is how you talk about that obsession. It’s the perspective that you bring on the topic, and the way you communicate why it’s your obsession.

So there’s a simple formula for what makes something worthy of people’s time. It’s Obsession times Voice. It’s a unique perspective on something you care deeply about, that no one else can copy. That’s the kind of thing I want to read on the web. Look at sites like The Loop, Daring Fireball, and The Brooks Review. They’re all successful because they’ve figured out the Obsession times Voice equation.

The third lesson I learned is that writing is relatively easy when compared to actually publishing the stuff that you write. That’s where it gets real. I still feel like this every time I hover over the Send to Blog button:

The thing is, publishing what you write is the only way you’re going to get better at it. Once your words are out there, it will be scrutinized. That is terrifying but also really exciting. People will correct you on things when you are wrong. That is a bonus benefit of thinking in public: you learn so much from feedback. But that only happens if you get things out of your drafts folder and onto your site.

How is that working out?

Building Elezea on these principles has worked pretty well for me so far. It has not only brought writing and advertising opportunities, but more importantly, it has brought me a great community of readers who communicate regularly via email and Twitter and other platforms.

If I can sum up what I’ve learned about online publishing in one sentence, it’s that who your readers are is more important than how many you have. Sure, I’d love for my traffic to grow a little bit faster. But I won’t do it if it comes at the cost of compromising the principles I’ve described above, because I know a click is empty until someone actually sticks around for more than a few minutes. That’s what makes this a meaningful and fulfilling experience, and that’s what makes me push on and keep writing here week after week.

So for those of you who keep coming back, THANK YOU. Not to get all mushy on you, but you make me happy.

For those interested, the full slide deck from the talk is here.

From Jared Sinclair’s excellent “Form Follows Function” Is More Complicated Than iOS 7 Thinks, in which he explains why some of the skeuomorphic elements of iOS 1-6 were actually useful:

On iOS, putting function before form is not as simple as paring down icons to a strict grid and color palette. There are functions beyond literal communication that iOS designers must balance. Making icons warm and inviting serves many deeper purposes. It builds your confidence in the device. It makes you feel in control. It sets your mind and thumbs at ease. It communicates through feeling and memory, and when done well, resonates with human experience in a way that PCs never could.

There have been a few other defences of appropriate skeuomorphic elements recently. From Kevin Suttle’s Frame of Reference:

There has been quite a bit of confusion over what skeuomorphism is. Many define it as “creating digital products or interfaces that resemble their physical counterparts”. The goal of skeuomorphic style was to leverage our pre-existing affordances and lend a healthy amount of familiarity and confidence to digital interfaces.

And from Dan Wineman’s must-read Look, and Feel:

Affordances are the baby to skeuomorphism’s bathwater. When they engage our instincts just right, they create an emotional bond, and the unfamiliar becomes inviting. Without them, it’s just pictures under glass. It makes no difference how flat, how deep, how minimal, or how ornate the look-and-feel is if it can’t show us, when we look, how to feel.

So, as it turns out, good design is (still) all about affordance.

A big thanks to Techi.com for sponsoring Elezea’s RSS feed this week!

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Dan Frommer weighs in with a positive view of Twitter’s more visual timeline in The Best Part Of Twitter’s New Design Is That It’s Experimenting In Public:

Love or hate Twitter’s new design features — I like the in-line photo and video previews, but the reply/fav/retweet icons under every tweet feel a little too noisy — they say one great thing about Twitter: That it’s not afraid to experiment boldly in public. […]

Remember: Twitter’s goal is to maintain its independence, and soon become a large, profitable, public media company. If Twitter can try new things — in public — that make its service easier to understand, easier to use, easier to monetize, and easier to grow, that’s a big victory for the company and its users.

The key point in Frommer’s analysis is what Twitter has become: a media company that makes money through advertising. This means that there needs to be a way to show ads more prominently, so that they can charge more for those ads. That places very specific constraints on how the product can be designed. If ads need more clicks, ads need more prominence. One way to give ads more prominence is to make them take over a larger part of the screen. So Twitter is testing one way of accomplishing that with their “more visual timeline”.

Of course, brands figured out pretty quickly that they can take up more of the screen if they add a photo to their links:

Contrast that with Tweetbot’s view of the same Co.Design tweet (and others):

I think what we’re forgetting is that Twitter has chosen their path. Sorry for repeating myself, but they’ve become a media company that makes money through advertising. For the foreseeable future, all product decisions will reflect that. This is where I disagree with Frommer. I don’t think this change makes the service easier to understand and easier to use. It does, however, make it easier to monetize, and easier to grow.

The bottom line is this. Don’t think for a minute that Twitter doesn’t realize that inline images hurt the user experience by reducing the scanability of tweets. Of course they know. But they don’t have a choice. They are now operating within the design constraints of the company they have chosen to become. If you don’t like it, buy Tweetbot before they hit their API limit.

Comment on Google+

Tom Chatfield looks at the meaning and value of our time and attention in What is the real cost of your online attention? He makes the point that we are now all amateur attention economists who have to make increasingly complex decisions about how we spend our time:

We watch a 30-second ad in exchange for a video; we solicit a friend’s endorsement; we freely pour sentence after sentence, hour after hour, into status updates and stock responses. None of this depletes our bank balances. Yet its cumulative cost, while hard to quantify, affects many of those things we hope to put at the heart of a happy life: rich relationships, rewarding leisure, meaningful work, peace of mind.

What kind of attention do we deserve from those around us, or owe to them in return? What kind of attention do we ourselves deserve, or need, if we are to be ‘us’ in the fullest possible sense? These aren’t questions that even the most finely tuned popularity contest can resolve. Yet, if contentment and a sense of control are partial measures of success, many of us are selling ourselves far too cheap.

Tom Simonite wrote a very interesting investigative piece called The Decline of Wikipedia: Even As More People Than Ever Rely on It, Fewer People Create It:

Wikipedia’s community built a system and resource unique in the history of civilization. It proved a worthy, perhaps fatal, match for conventional ways of building encyclopedias. But that community also constructed barriers that deter the newcomers needed to finish the job. Perhaps it was too much to expect that a crowd of Internet strangers would truly democratize knowledge. Today’s Wikipedia, even with its middling quality and poor representation of the world’s diversity, could be the best encyclopedia we will get.

The article also reminds me of one of the best episodes of Hypercritical ever, called Marked for Deletion. John Siracusa goes into a highly entertaining and informative tirade about the problems with Wikipedia, which is well worth the listen.

Jonathan Franzen wrote a Guardian piece on what’s wrong with the modern world. It’s long and dense and sometimes requires multiple re-readings to figure out what’s going on, but he gives us much to think about. Let’s just say that he’s not a fan of what technology is doing to us:

One of the worst things about the internet is that it tempts everyone to be a sophisticate — to take positions on what is hip and to consider, under pain of being considered unhip, the positions that everyone else is taking.

He also has some harsh words for Amazon:

Amazon wants a world in which books are either self-published or published by Amazon itself, with readers dependent on Amazon reviews in choosing books, and with authors responsible for their own promotion. The work of yakkers and tweeters and braggers, and of people with the money to pay somebody to churn out hundreds of five-star reviews for them, will flourish in that world.

And that’s all I’ll quote from the article, in the hopes of piquing your interest to read the whole thing.

Derek Powazek makes the case that Twitter is an Argument Machine:

I’m not saying that Twitter was designed to create arguments. I’m just saying that, if you set out to create an Argument Machine, it’d come out looking a lot like Twitter.

He also makes some interesting suggestions for how Twitter could be designed differently to prevent arguments from getting out of control. This does remind me of something I observed a while ago after getting mauled by the Argument Machine…

I’m pretty sure no one emerges at the other side of a Twitter debate going, “Man, I’m really glad I did that.”

— Rian van der Merwe (@RianVDM) February 7, 2013

John Gruber in Thoughts and Observations Regarding This Week’s Apple Event Introducing the iPad Air and Retina iPad Mini:

This puts Microsoft in a tight spot. Apple gives away software for free in exchange for your buying their hardware. This is not charity. It’s also in marked contrast to Google, who gives away software for free in exchange for selling your attention (and personal information) to advertisers. Apple and Google are squeezing Microsoft from both sides, and the result is that less and less perceived value in the industry resides solely in software. You can make money selling hardware (like Apple) or make money selling ads (like Google), but given the popularity of Apple’s hardware and Google’s apps and services, it’s getting harder for Microsoft to make money by selling software.

John Moltz in Rudderless Microsoft:

I don’t think Microsoft is going anywhere. I mean that in two ways: 1) I mean they’re not going away and 2) right now they’re not going where the puck is going. They’re sailing somewhat aimlessly though increasingly margin-less waters. And the degree to which Microsoft’s investors, boosters and followers are OK with that is rather baffling.

It’s hard to write about Microsoft. If you think they’re doing great things you get ridicule from the Apple side. If you think they’re headed for disaster you’re labeled as a brainwashed fanboy. As with most things, the truth is more likely somewhere in the middle. But even the most die-hard Microsoft fan has to admit that Microsoft has been painted into a corner:

• By making OS X 10.9 and its core apps free, Apple is creating an expectation that all operating systems should be free. It doesn’t matter that fewer computers run OS X — it’s about the precedent and how that affects consumer expectations.
• By making services like Gmail and Docs “free”1, and by continuing to reduce the feature set gaps between those services and Microsoft Office, Google is forcing users to ask tough questions about the software they’re using, and why they’re paying so much for it. When authors like Charles Stross start taking on industry conventions by writing Why Microsoft Word must Die, you need to realise that your product is walking very close to the edge of a tipping point.

And yet, Microsoft appears to be doubling down on what are their two biggest strategic mistakes.

First, they’re not owning the whole hardware/software supply chain. Reading Gartner’s advice to Apple in 2006 is almost funny now in how wrong it ended up being:

Increasing component costs and pressure to cut its prices mean Apple’s best bet for long-term success is to quit the hardware business and license the Mac to Dell, analyst firm Gartner claimed on Tuesday.

The point is simple: if Microsoft can’t make money on PC hardware (which they can’t), they need to make money on the software. But that gets very hard when the “free” options become more and more appealing. Yes, most organizations still rely on Exchange for their mail and calendars. But how long can that last when employees all switch to Gmail and can’t shut up about how horrible Outlook is? RIM thought they had the enterprise market locked up because they controlled IT managers. How did that work out for them once employees starting rushing the IT castle, demanding support for their iPhones?

Second, Microsoft is sticking with their “You don’t have to compromise!” philosophy. Does Surface run a a desktop OS, or a tablet OS? Neither, and both! And that is a huge problem. By not making “compromises” they’re actually compromising way too much. Perhaps Doug Bowman summed it up best:

@gruber On the C word. Someone recently put it to me that all design is a series of compromises; but good design finds the right ones.

— Doug Bowman (@stop) February 6, 2013

Trying to use a desktop OS on a tablet isn’t “no compromise”, it’s utter frustration, and it doesn’t look like Microsoft is planning to stop doing that any time soon. From Engadget’s Microsoft Surface Pro 2 review:

As a tablet, the Surface Pro has made fewer strides. And that’s a shame, since the Pro is, at its heart, a tablet. […] The new Pro is much improved, but it’s still at its best in notebook mode. Indeed, whoever buys this needs to want a tablet and laptop in more or less equal measure. Because if what you really want is a laptop you can occasionally use as a tablet, you’re still better off with a convertible Ultrabook.

This inability to compromise has always been a problem for Microsoft. Back in 2006 Microsoft gave us a look at the most-used features in Word 2003, and it includes this paragrah:

Beyond the top 10 commands or so, however, the curve flattens out considerably. The percentage difference in usage between the #100 command (“Accept Change”) and the #400 command (“Reset Picture”) is about the same in difference between #1 and #11 (“Change Font Size”) This is what makes creating the new UI challenging — people really do use a lot of the breadth of Office and beyond the top 10 commands there are a lot of different ways of using the product.

Apple would look at that data and say, “let’s cut the bottom 200 commands.” Microsoft looked at it and said, “We’re going to need a bigger ribbon.”2

In short, what Microsoft needs most now is a leader who knows how to make the right compromises. It needs someone who can figure out how to bring the success of the Xbox integrated business (oh look, they make the hardware and the software for that!) to the rest of the company.

Update: As the honorable Mr. Maughan points out, this relates nicely to his post Compromise and glorified ignorance.

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1. The usual “If you’re not buying the product, you are the product” disclaimer applies. ↩

2. For another example, see Improvements in Windows Explorer. ↩