Blogging Advice

Coattail Riding Instructions For YouTube

Whether you believe YouTube is bigger than MySpace or not (I’m in the “not” wagon) there are still some things to keep in mind if you’re trying to work with the video behemoth. YouTube may or may not be flipbait because of the copyright issues, but there’s no reason why your company can’t work some YouTube videos into its normal offerings to better your overall interactive experience.

Although you might be itching to flip the camera on and jumpstart your 15 minutes of fame, please don’t. Here’s a list of things that you shouldn’t be doing because 1) they’re played out, 2) boring, or 3) not innovative whatsoever.

5 Ways To Make Me Laugh At Your Web 2.0 Company

In this fast-paced and synergistic world, buzzwords get the play. Non-technical people start companies and press ridiculous deadlines to their engineers, Web 1.0 burnouts start new companies that are just rehashes of the idea they couldn’t make work in 1999, and the technology you use is more important than the value you provide. Hell, VCs are getting sick of their clients making it big, so they’re starting half-assed “Web 2.0” companies of their own which are off the map 1 month after beta.

In all this craziness I have to wonder what some people are thinking. I can’t tell you how many ugly designs and worthless “applications” I’ve seen come across my browser pixels the past 5 months, but what I can divulge is the precise 5-step plan for making me laugh at you and your company. Here we go:

Team Size and Individual Responsibilities

There are some people up in arms at Peter Merholtz’s blog, and those people feel that something Jason Fried wrote is attacking the profession of information architecture. Here’s the quote that’s bunching the pants:

“We’ll never hire someone who’s an information architect. It’s just
too overly specific. With a small team like ours, it doesn’t make
sense to hire people with such a narrowly defined skill-set.”

The Decisionmakers and Sucking Down

Venture capitalist and 9rules member Guy Kawasaki just wrote about The Art of Sucking Down, which essentially is how everyone needs to respect those who have power over certain aspects of our lives. Don’t piss-off waiters because they handle your food, did you see “Waiting”? Don’t yell at people at the airplane ticket counter because they control where your baggage goes and who you’ll sit next to. Basically Guy is saying that you shouldn’t bite the hand that feeds you, or else that hand won’t feed you anymore.

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