Clearly, the role of Governor of California is a no-win situation.
Anyone who understands how California is impacted by the referendum process, a super majority requirement for passing the budget, term limits and our current legislative districts would know that being Governor is a sure way to add a major public failure to your resume.
Let’s start with the referendum process. We, the people, have the ability to force the state to spend large parts of the annual budget on pet projects. We can make this happen by getting our spending bias on the ballot by virtue of referendum. Now, this all sounds very democratic, but the reality has proven anything but empowering to the people. To pass a referendum in the state of California requires a ton of advertising on TV. This is expensive. Individual people typically don’t have that kind of cash laying around. So, corporations are usually the backers behind these issues as they are able to pool the financial resources required to flood the airwaves prior to an election and get an issue passed. Even better, there’s no requirement that the ads be truthful or even accurately reflective of the issue being pushed. It could be a bill that forces the state government to spend tons of cash on highway improvements that would benefit the logging industry in some remote location….but the ads on TV could be about how the bill keeps criminals in jail or illegals aliens out…or whatever works in whatever part of the state you want to get some votes. Logical connections between the bill and the advertisement are not required.
Over the years, this has unfortunately resulted in a majority of the state’s budget getting spent before the legislators even get to argue about what to include or exclude from the budget! But no politician can campaign for reform for obvious reasons. Say, I advocated reforming the referendum. Well, my opponent would call me a marxist or something on TV and say that I wanted to remove the citizen’s right to affect how government spends money. Yea, I’d lose that advertising campaign and then my next election. Even though reform is necessary for our state.
Let’s move on to our crazy legislative districting.
Over the years, whatever party is in power has done whatever it could to stay in power. One tactic has been to redraw the legislative districts so as to ensure a party loyalty per district so the person in power knows they can continue to preach to the choir of their district and stay in office. Looking at an actual map of California state legislative districts looks like someone threw spaghetti against a picture of our state…it’s ridiculous.
On top of that is term limits. This limits the amount of time a politician can stay in their legislative role. Normally, you’d think a policy such as this would promote a healthy turnover of legislators which benefits the state by bringing in new people with new ideas all the time. Well, when you have highly partisan districts, you get highly partisan representatives. And when you given them term limits as well, you remove the need for them to ever feel like they want to build long standing relationships with legislators across the aisle. In fact, every ideological hill looks good to die on! There’s no personal need to compromise ever.
So, our current crazy legislative districts coupled with terms limits effectively gives us ideologically hell bent representatives with no personal inclination or professional need to compromise with their counter-parties in the government.
When you layer a super majority requirement to pass the budget on top of this crowd of folks fundamentally disinclined to compromise, you get no compromise and no smooth passing of the budget.
Every year, the budget is delayed and the state suffers a fiscal crisis. The new person wanting to run for governor gets to blame that on the last governor….which as I’ve shown here has very little to do with the systemic problems that truly contribute to our state’s fiscal ineptitude.
So, is the new candidate for governor ignorant of our state’s management issues? Or is the candidate aware, and just wants the sexy job of governor because it plays well to ego?
Anyone running for governor is either ignorant or an egomaniac.
Possibly more interestingly, that conclusion can be drawn from a series of negative premises regarding the legislature.
It’s been a while since my lats post on the subject…sounds like the start of a teenage journal or diary entry….but in any case, it has been a while. Which I think is to be expected while this project remains a hobby more than a business.
But the important thing is, I think, progress has been made. And I am here to report it!
To set the progress in context, I recap the basics of the progress. My friends and I are working on a mobile app. Our lead off platform for the mobile app will be the iPhone, however since starting on this project, Android has really become an interesting player in the market and BlackBerry is never to be discounted. Plus, as we consider the use case for our app, as well as the target market, we expect to need to provide it in all three platforms.
But first is iPhone, of course.
As the the lead off iPhone app, the basics of the mobile app are written. I can login to the app on the iPhone and perform some basic functions that are the foundation to the app’s value proposition. That’s about it for today. But it’s a good start! I think with these sorts of side projects, just getting some code down that actually works is a huge first step. It’s the first step that then provides a driver for future steps in that you think, “since I allready did the first step, I can’t let that go to waste!” But if you don’t do the first step, then you never commit to any real degree, and nothing ever gets started.
So, we have our first step.
Maybe more exciting is the progress we’ve made with graphic design. My buddy Matt Rhodes, of Denver Colorado is working on that side of the project for us. Matt was my roommate in college. Honestly, I had no idea he was such an artist in college. I mean I saw the doodling in the margins of his notebooks from time to time, but didn’t have a concept for how he would be making a living off that talent when we grew up. Well, I’m stoked he’s working with us on this one, because he’s pretty good at it! I thought I’d share the app logo here…for the first time….tada!
Now, the logo may raise a lot of questions about what kind of app we’re building. Well, for the purposes of remaining sufficiently ambiguous at this point (acknowledging there is really no technical barrier to entry on this one ) let’s just say, we’re building a mobile app that facilitates micro financial transactions between peers in small social networks while incorporating some elements of game design to make it fun.
The other big news for this project is the inclusion of Don Canoy. Don is going to be working on the web side of the app, while Tim continues to tackle the mobile side. Don worked with me on Famplosion, and so I’m very excited to be working together on this project going forward! For those who are curious, the web side, including the components accessed by the app on the web are being built using Ruby on Rails…just like Famplosion. The iPhone app is native Objective C, which I understand Apple announce last week that the native part is now a requirement as they continue to position against Adobe and Flash. Apple’s interest in limiting the flexibility available to developing mobile apps is a little frustrating, but hey, it’s their ecosystem, we’re just trying to live in it, right…
Over on TechCrunch, Ashkan Karbasfrooshan of WatchMojo posted a very interesting perspective on how to make money with online video. Essentially, he breaks down the online video market into component parts in a graph that does a better job that any I’ve seen so far. It’s safe to assume this graph will continue to evolve as the industry continues to mature at a rapid rate. But it’s also safe to say, the spoils will go to the content producers.
This is a particularly exciting perspective. It seems to validate the value of scarcity, and in this case the scarcity of good content. In building a successful web video business, it’s not enough to aggregate content, or ad space…you need to create compelling content! This is hard. It was hard in the era of TV, Movies, and now the web.
It’s like a natural law of media. Google’s success as an aggregator of other people’s content lulled the industry into believing creative talent was no longer necessary for achieving stunning wealth in a media business. Well, according to Ashkan, Google was a perfect storm of circumstances that I think is unlikely to occur again.
And to be honest, that makes me happy. From an artist’s perspective, the value of creativity can not be underrated, because truly creating something other’s appreciate is rare. The sooner the web video industry gets to a place where that rare talent is produced, distributed and monetized efficiently, the better.
That said, I think Jeff Whatcott adds an interesting point in his post regarding this piece. He writes, “One of the things that I think Ashkan has missed here is the imporant concept that success in media is about assembling and monetizing an audience at least as much as it is about assembling content. Of course, both are required to succeed, but I think that not enough attention is paid to segmentation, targeting, community building, and brand building. These are a few of the essential building blocks for gathering a valuable audience, and that is essential to building value in media.”
I’m learning from my new colleagues at SmithGeiger, how traditional media companies do an excellent job of segmenting the audience, understanding the audience’s perspective on the content that is created, and then leveraging that perspective more effectively to monetize their work. This is activity that has been going on for a long time in the traditional media sphere, and it seems the web content world will benefit from this sort of insight as well…as soon as they both realize the need and reach a scale capable of paying for this kind of effort. It’s not cheap, but as we are learning, few things of real value are.
Here’s a really interesting article by Stanley Fish in NYT.com.
The malleable line between speech and action seems to be at the crux of the consternation regarding this latest decision concerning the First Amendment and free speech. It seems like the author is suggesting that the justices had it well within reason to have found a decision more unfavorable to the “corporate person” if they had the will to do so in the majority.
While I’m a fan of how the corporate personhood concept shields the individual agent from liability to a large degree, as this enables risk that I believe in as an entrepreneur, I’m pretty disappointed by the recent ruling as it makes the personhood concept seem ridiculous in it’s logical extensions.
Some common sense realism as the Scots would have considered it, or the Legal Realism of Cohen mentioned in the article, would have been nice in this case. Maybe some interdisciplinary backgrounds to future justices will help? If I remember my history correctly, John Marshall didn’t have a law degree, and that worked out ok.
A lot of attention right now is given to the technical tasks associated with structuring and presenting content in a way that allows the search engines to index your content effectively. This sort of activity involves tasks commonly associated with Search Engine Optimization. Activities like content silo’ing, meta-tagging, keyword placement, XML site map submitting, cross linking, A/B and multivariate testing, etc, are some of the tactics involved in a broader strategy for ensuring your content is optimized for search engine indexing. If your content is well indexed by the search engines, then the people out there searching for something related to your content will hopefully find you before they find someone else. The irony obviously, is that in this stage you have to appease the bot to get to the humans. You need to know how the bot “thinks” as much if not more than how your audience thinks.
But assuming you do a good job of appeasing the bots, and the bots in turn bring you unsuspecting humans, then you have to know what to do with the humans. This is where a deep understanding of your audience’s psychographics will help in developing a strategy for broadening and, more importantly, deepening your relationship with your audience. Psychographics refers to an understanding of who your consumer is, where they are coming from, what they are looking for, and how they look for it…what motivates them. It’s the psychology counter point to demographics which is more focused on quantitative group profiling than understanding the motivations or attitudes, interests, and opinions of the people that compose that group. Both are important. But the motivations side of that coin is most often overlooked.
Publishing excellent content is good. Leveraging Search Engine Optimization practices to promote your excellent content is great. But if you have a growing audience for your content, it rapidly becomes important to understand why they like you. Knowing why your audience likes you will help build a sustainable approach to your content strategy as you understand the motivations behind the numbers for your success.
So, this all begs the questions, “how do I discern the motivations of my audience?” Well, there in lies the tough stuff. It requires primary research. I mean talking to actual humans….I know, this is something we thought we could avoid in an era of Analytics. I thought for a long time, that math would enable me to tool away in my little digital cave and at the same time affect real people through the internet everywhere. Well, it seems analytics shows us what’s working, but still fails to explain the details of why (or as a colleague recently pointed out…why not) Primary research with real life humans is still required in understanding why humans behave they way they do.
The good news is that this primary research when coupled with rigorous analytics is like pulling the curtain back to expose a method behind the magic. And that’s powerful.
About now, the media and blogosphere start publishing lists of the most important things that happened during the course of the year. I’ll be referencing here some of the Top 10 lists I find and think are most interesting.
Top 10 Biggest Social Media Stories of 2009This post in Vator.tv by Ronny Kerr lists is interesting on a few levels. I personally think #7 in his list is the most important as it references the growing role of Citizen Journalism. As main stream media news continues to degrade, we will rely more on the notion of the citizen journalist. The local concerned individual empowered with tools for publishing and distributing news will become a greater force as those platforms continue to evolve. On top of this, the advent of real-time search exemplified by Twitter’s efforts in this area as well as Google’s year ending adding of real-time data to their SERPs will enable us all to stay informed through new channels of information and new forms of journalism. Sifting through the growing pains involving insanely poor quality journalism will unfortunately be a condition we need to suffer through as this trend seeks maturity. Jeff Jarvis refers to this as the “deprofessionalization” of journalism in a recent post. (His post is not a list, but definitely worth reading on the subject of citizen journalism.)
Crunks 2009: The Year in Media Errors and CorrectionsOK, this post is not a Top 10 list, however, it’s an awesome line up of errors and corrections made by news media outlets during 2009. I predict the issue of news reporting errors is going to trend in a devastating way in the coming years. This will be due to two fundamental reasons. First, fact checkers are getting laid off at all the major news organizations. Second, the dissemination of any information (including erroneous) on the internet is like wildfire…which I guess shows reason number 2.5, which is, inflammatory erroneous information spreads faster than the boring stuff accurate stuff. All business models are stoked by fast dissemination of information, so there is a clear incentive to spread total crap. Total crap pays better on the internet. Thankfully, we have the blog, Regret the Error, hopefully to stem the tide of this unfortunate trend by showing a possible crowd sourcing model for news fact checking.
President Obama’s recent speech accepting the Nobel Peace Prize seems to have been viewed by the Right as a surprising reaffirmation of american exceptionalism. The speech also seems to be viewed by the Left as a surprising contradiction to the idealism that supports a rigorously (and some might consider utopian) pacifist social ethic.
I can understand why the Right is emboldened by Obama’s apparent affirmation of american exceptionalism. I heard Obama refer to America’s unique position in the world during the course of his speech. But the notion of american exceptionalism finds its foundation in the sense that America is given by God a unique role to play and that betrothal is a reflection of our society’s unique affiliation with the Almighty. Our dominant role is bequeathed by God…or so the adherents to american exceptionalism tend to believe.
However, Obama’s speech seemed to reflect a more nuanced historical premise. He did not appeal to a simplistic theological justification for America’s conquests as have previous Presidents been so willing to enlist (at least for the sake of rhetoric). In his speech, he references the blood and sacrifice of American troops as the foundation for our current role as the sole super power in geo-political affairs. I agree. We were in a position to defend freedom during the course of the previous century, and so we did. As a result, we are in a unique position in the world, and this unique position enables us to further our defense of freedom for peoples everywhere.
My sense of (what I’ll call orthodox) american exceptionalism is that it finds its justification in a belief akin to manifest destiny. I mean to say, that the insertion of God as the prime mover in our foreign policy seems analogous to the way manifest destiny was justified by a theological premise and thereby influenced our domestic policy from a century prior.
The blending of theology and politics always comes at a price. And that price is often inconsistent policy positions across various issues at best. At worst, the price entails the subservience of justice to a particular constituency’s moral framework.
A lot has been said about the influence of Niebuhrian realism on Obama’s foreign policy. (Here’s a post in The American Spectator) That influence was clearly evident in Obama’s speech at the Nobel award ceremony. Obama’s statements regarding his role involving “seeing the world as it is” showed both Neibuhr’s influence on Obama as well as the burden Obama now seems to grapple with fully. Being President is a far cry from being Candidate.
Obama’s speech made me wonder what Reinhold Neibuhr would have thought of the Administration’s current foreign policy direction. I wonder also what Neibuhr’s thoughts would be on the broader concept of an increasingly orthodox american exceptionalism.
Lastly, Obama’s speech made me glad. If nothing more, it’s nice to see that a dialectic of ideas is evidently playing a role in the thought process Obama pursues as he fleshes out his worldview and how that will inform his role as leader of the free world.
I just finished reading Rae Hoffman’s post in the Outspoken Media blog about Google’s new real time search inclusion of Tweets. Now tweets deemed relevant to a keyword search appear at the top of the SERP evidently assigning huge value to recency in the algorithm. Hoffman does an excellent job of outlining why this is scary as hell. Really, everyone should read it.
The story reminded me of the Google Sidewiki launch. That new service by Google allows anyone to post a comment about anyone else’s website. If you have the Sidewiki tool on your browser you can view the posts left by everyone else over time. It’s a potential nightmare for folks interested in having their website represent their best foot forward. I posted about this issue a while back, and can understand the challenge of blending the internet value of “transparency” with the marketer’s desire to influence brand sentiment. But the tone-deafness of Google in how (now two) products have been released is troubling.
The lack of sensitivity reflected by these launches is alluded to in Ken Auletta’s book, Googled. (Here’s a review of the book) He attributes it to an extreme engineer’s mindset. This may or may not be true, but my concern is that as Google marches on toward controlling more and more of our experience on the web, there will be more and more of these missteps that place our privacy and security at increasingly greater risk.
Here’s a video from Blaine Mathieu, CMO of Lyris, regarding Marketing trends for 2010. He does a great job of pitching his company’s offerings, but regardless, I agree with his sense of industry direction.
From a high level, quant skills will be more valuable than ever in Marketing as Analytics is not something just for the web master to care about anymore. Social Network apps & brand sentiment, Mobile apps, Email campaigns and Search marketing can all be measured in ways never dreamed of before. The ability to measure and track metrics will penetrate more and more deeply into the mindset of modern integrated marketing.
The tools to build these apps and the contexts within which to deploy them are rapidly approaching maturity. This should drive costs down well enough to make app development a function of every integrated marketing campaign. Then tracking all those apps through Analytics will drive a stronger perceived value for quant skill sets in the integrated marketing professional.
There could be a danger of the pendulum swinging a little too far and traditional qualitative skills being slightly less valued in the short term. I don’t know, but I could see how that might happen. But, I think over time, qualitative skills will find solid footing again and the integrated marketing professional will emerge as someone who is capable of thinking equally out of the left as well as the right side of his/her brain.
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) let’s just say, we’re building a mobile app that facilitates micro financial transactions between peers in small social networks while incorporating some elements of game design to make it fun.![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=6e0dc6b7-a51c-4871-be2e-f6d8b20a0ee5)
This is a particularly exciting perspective. It seems to validate the value of scarcity, and in this case the scarcity of good content. In building a successful web video business, it’s not enough to aggregate content, or ad space…you need to create compelling content! This is hard. It was hard in the era of TV, Movies, and now the web.![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=a8f46e65-fe2c-4204-9932-3aef61380f6c)
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