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Middleman be gone!

I sit here staring at screen-number-two, its 1920 x 1080 pixels taunting me: “Waste time with Youtube! With Facebook! Read editorial comments by anonymous idiots!” I have deadlines. I must write. Yet thoughts about art and writing and making a living strike me. Do tell, Gary. Do tell.

These thoughts are around money and business and art and Adam Corolla.

Yes, Adam Corolla (@adamcorolla). The guy from the Man Show and Love Line and the radio and now the number-one podcast. Love him or hate him, he has recently made an important point. One that Seth Godin would be proud of. Adam has made the theoretical real.

Recently, he decided to forgo a lucrative guaranteed radio contract and instead continue to independently produce his podcast and try to make money out of it. Stupid or inspirational? To me, inspirational. I see many parallels between what he is doing from a business perspective as it relates to his art (use quotes around “art” if you must, I won’t) and what I have done and am now trying to do. Subtract a few zeros to the left of the decimal point and here are the things he is doing that I really respect and want to do:

- Take what you have always done, cut out the middleman, and make a living

OK, well, I was going to write a whole bunch of bullets, but that first one sums it up. (Yes, writer friends, then I shouldn’t have used a bullet.)

Thanks to @createspace, formsite, google, @squareup, others to be mentioned, and my years of skill and knowledge and personal connections, why do I need a middleman make my latest project a reality?

I don’t! And neither do a whole host of comedians, writers, painters, musicians, and academic writers. Include your favorite examples of success in the comments if you please.

Now, I do need help and have partners and have made decisions to share possible future profits appropriately. But that is under my control now. Not delegated to a guy or gal in New York or LA or London who has four other projects and will focus only on the one that they think is most lucrative.

Adam, thanks for helping me decide to give it the old college try – on pain of possibly going broke – to do what would have had to have been done under the rubric of “the man” years ago. And, if I fail, well, I am simultaneously looking for full-time work and consulting contracts (hint hint, my eLearning and collaboration technology friends) as I do this project on my off hours!

Artistes, waketh ye up!

One of my college mentors Marly Youmans has a fascinating poetry and writing blog called The Palace at 2:00am. On it, she has a series of posts called House of Words written by her and her rabid followers and friends from around the globe. I’ll summarize this series (but you should read it yourself):

1. It is hard to sell poetry and getting harder to do it through traditional means
2. Some artists don’t know how to, don’t want to, or can’t sell.
3. Of the set in number 2 above, some don’t care – they produce art for arts sake and their spouse feeds them and pays the bills or some such arrangement.
4. Of the remainder of the set in number 2, some amazing writers and poets are learning how to represent themselves myriad new ways on paper, online, and in person. And cutting out (or redefining) the middleman and scraping out a living where in theory, none should be available
5. Support the arts, or don’t complain when they dwindle to nothinghood

And don’t forget she has overflowing buckets of her own and others’ poetry on her blog plus links to buy her stuff.

If you are an artist and don’t want to make even a part of your living off it, that is fine. Really. I have friends like that and they are phenomenal people. If you want to make even a part of your living off your art, you need to become somewhat of a businessperson or delegate that role to someone or some group. I don’t think it will make you less of an artist.

I argue that if you are good, or even middling, or just aspiring to get better you have a responsibility to distribute and create awareness and get feedback. And this feedback loop is at least partially defined by marketing and selling.

Best to all,

Gary “Hopefully not an audience of one for my upcoming projects” Dietz

Hi,

I have produced a short video with a selection of my personal thoughts about financial supports for people with disabilities.  On March 10, from 1-3pm and 6-9pm in the New Hampshire State House in Concord in the Representative’s Hall there are hearings where I am sure many wonderful families will give a wide variety of testimonies.  I hope to be there to listen to these brave people if I can.

I’ve heard second hand that some of our current long-term and freshman legislators say “why do we need to listen to these sob stories?  It’s all about the numbers.”  I don’t agree with that perspective, but must acknowledge it is a real feeling that some in power have.

With that in mind, I tried to produce a video about some financial perspectives for DHHS and Medicaid programs for people with disabilities without any “wall of tears” testimony.  And pointing out some of the inconsistencies about this “numeric approach and ROI” for other departments in the state when compared to DHHS.

To watch this video click play below. The direct link to the full size video on Youtube is  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymVfIbz5JHY.

Edit: See MS-Word version of script here: http://www.6by7reports.com/dhhs-script.doc

I am going to leave comments open with no moderation here (they are shut off for the Youtube video) but reserve the right to shut them off if people get nasty.  It’s my blog and I can moderate if I want

If you have comments on this topic that you want to send me privately, please send them to dad@6by7reports.com

Thanks,

Gary

P.S. Full text script and close captioning for the video coming over the weekend.

Darn it, someone already invented the word “Prezume.”  That is a resume created using the tool Prezi.

Well la-di-da!  I created a resume in 1991 on OS/2 using the IPF compiler and distributed it on 3.5″ floppy disks!  It even had a 256 color-depth scan of a photo of me on it! So there!

A tool is a presentation tool when it allows you only to show your slides to others while you talk.  The people listening to you have very little ability to respond and inform the conversation or even add materials or interaction to it.  Heaven forbid they can ask each other questions while you talk!

A tool is a collaboration tool when it is allows all of the people using it to constructively add to the dialog and interact in a number of ways, including without the direction of the leader.

A good test between the two modalities is this:  Can you use the tool WITHOUT ever using slides? If so, it is probably a collaboration tool.

If all you want me to do is listen to you and watch your slides, please send me a Slideshare link or even a PPT with embedded audio.   You’ll save money and I’ll save time.

A number of years back I was at an educational technology show in Ohio.  A very young teacher walked up to me at my booth to check out my product.  But before she asked anything, she told me she was an elementary school teacher and that she should get the product for free.  After all, it was for the kids.

My answer was inappropriate and unduly curt.  I told her “My son needs speech and physical therapy.  I think those therapists should provide those services for free.  He needs a 1:1 helper.  And that helper should work for free.  After all, it is for the child.”  The teacher didn’t quite catch my point and walked away from the booth.

I very quickly realized I was being quite a jerk, ran out of the booth to to find her and her senior staff member, and profusely apologized and begged for forgiveness for being one.  Her heart was in the right place and I was completely insensitive.  I “owned” my attitude toward her and have worked for a long while after that outburst to understand how differing perspectives on what should “cost” something in education have come to be.

That interaction really stuck with me and has informed a large vein in my career as a vendor in educational technology.  The relationship between public and private —  between free and pay — between the work you give away because you “just should” and how it relates to the things you are paid to do — these relationships are complex and not black and white.  Giving things away isn’t always altruism.  But neither is it always self-centered promotion.  And taking them isn’t always “selling out.”  But neither is it always wise, depending on who is doing the giving.

In a community relations program I help fomalize at one of my employers, we were empowered to give away quite a bit of services to organizations that may or may not have been able to afford it — but who always had an excellent plan about how those services would benefit education at large.  As an executive on the vendor or grantor side, one could choose to look at these “giveaways” in a few different ways:

• “Feel-good” public relations
• Seeding the market with the service in useful places where people likely wouldn’t have paid, but who are thought leaders
• Seeding prospects and helping them grow to a point where they would buy in the future.
• “Blocking” a competitive sale because you strategically give away your stuff to key organizations who will speak highly of you

Wise ”grantor” organizations that don’t only look at investments on a quarter-by-quarter basis would probably look at all of these perspectives.  Less progressive organizations could look only at the  ”why are we wasting time giving away free stuff” angle.

From the “grantee” perspective there are equally difficult perspectives to navigate. Some grantee organziations may choose to say no to a donation from a vendor because they may feel an obligation to “shill” for the company.  They may feel like anything in education that is for profit always has an nefarious reason to give something away.  Or they may be trying to leave their own organzation and get a job at the grantor company.

All viable and real perspectives.

Most appropriate and valuable to all is when the grantor and grantee realize that they depend on one another.  The vendor has some financial goals and the educational organization has some educational targets and the granting of free or low-cost service in exchange for authentic and public feedback in a variety of ways — from conference sponsorship or speaking slots to press interviews — can be  mutually beneficial.

In a future post I will write some good ways for granting vendors to incur the trust of the grantee organziations and ways that the grantee organziations can be most successful in making requests of vendors.

Hello friends and family!

Alexander and I went to New York City at the end of August 2010.  You can read, see, and watch an account of this amazing trip in a private blog entry.  Drop me an email and I’ll send it to you!

Thanks to all, especially those who made this trip possible!

Gary and Alexander

Hi,

I am trying to learn prezi to see how useful a tool it can be to me in helping visualize and present ideas in real and non-real time.  As part of this exercise, I took the cool diagram from Cinemablend that shows the five dreams levels in the movie Inception and created a freeform prezi out of it.  I didn’t intend for the prezi to follow a path so you’ll have to manually scroll and zoom.

I ain’t not artist, but if I end up using this tool more extensively, I’ll undoubtedly get someone on the PS side of the house to help me.

You can see my public prezi here.

Gary

A classic repost, more relevant today than ever:

In the January 28, 2005 Wall Street Journal author Jared Sandberg talked about some “technology assisted” embarrassments in remote meetings. For the most part he talks about conference calls. But what other challenges and opportunities do you get when communication is extended to other real-time technologies?
 
I have had the “pleasure” of seeing next-generation communications technology cause completely brand-new embarrassments. Jared, you think just hearing a toilet flush can interrupt a conference call? That is merely the beginning my friend!

Let’s look at the unintentional “fun” that video can add to online interactions. Not usually in a boardroom setting with a large room-based interactive video system, but more likely when using desktop interactive video and tools. (The social gaffes that can happen in video equipped boardrooms are usually mitigated by the fact that there are multiple people in each room and customary social cues are mostly available. Plus, you don’t as easily forget you are on camera in the formality of a boardroom setting. Not so on the videoconferencing equipped desktop computer used in your office or cubicle.)

The “intimacy” of one’s office or cubicle, just like that of an automobile, gives people false comfort to do things that they wouldn’t dare do in a boardroom. Let’s just say that I have seen more than one senior level executive blatantly “digitally probing his proboscis” in desktop-based online meetings.

After the real-time technology melts away, you can “forget” where you are. And this is a wonderfully double-edged sword. The nose-picking example is one bad edge of that sword. But on the positive edge, once the technology “melts away” the quick, interactive, and challenging aspects of an in-person class or meeting easily transfer online. In fact, there can actually be advantages.

For example, on the cultural front, I have personally found that when I am training non-native English speakers online the kinds of questions and challenges that appear in text chat along with the video and presentation are far deeper and more frequent than when I do the exact same training in person. To me, it is obvious that the comfort of distance and typed English make the remote trainees more open to discussion.

There are also technology set-up issues that can cause interruption. Sometimes people just don’t know how to prop up their PC’s webcam in a way that it aims at the right thing. Imagine that your camera is on your desk and your head is two feet higher than desk level. Once again, a kind of nose-cam can jump in (really I am not obsessed with noses). 

Less offensive, but equally annoying is the lampcam – when the camera aims right into a light or a window so that we see not the participant, but a bright halo of light (better than the nose-cam, but still not business and classroom appropriate). And, when people are working at home, we often get the kid-cam, the cat-cam, the UPS-man-cam, or the “I am eating in front of the camera-cam.” Some can be cute and enhance the meeting, some can get you nauseous.

Now that I touched on a few gross things, let’s look at how this new desktop based collaboration software changes the dynamics of meetings and classes in ways most people wouldn’t think of until they actually participate. 

In a “real classroom” you can’t, for the most part, instant message other students in the room to give them a running commentary  to agree or disagree with the teacher (or chat about football) without other people in the room knowing. With Internet conferencing you can. Again, a double-edged sword. On the upside a co-teacher or student can coach the presenter online in real-time when they are confusing or a student needs support from another to clarify a point. On the downside the students can chat about sports instead of focusing on math. 

In a “real meeting” you can’t cover up the video and data windows with your e-mail, your other work, or even a video game and just “listen in the background”. With online “rich media conferencing” you can. This is great for boring unimportant meetings that don’t demand 100% of your attention. But this is bad if you are the presenter of some important and compelling stuff but you your students don’t have the focus and self-control to pay attention. 

In a “real meeting” people can’t accidentally or purposefully log-in with a “handle” or “screen name” that makes it hard to quickly identify participants. All kinds of short-term havoc can be caused by this one. 

One online class inefficiency is not apparent until you actually host a data only conference where one presenter sends out slides or spreadsheets and everyone else can just watch. As a presenter, you rarely know who is really paying attention because you can neither hear nor see the remote participants. And, if the audio portion is on a conference call, it is hard to determine who is speaking without interruption or setting up a proper ettiquette. Worse, as insinuated by Jared’s example, the presenter will choose to mute EVERYONE to keep order (and keep out hold music) – but this makes it harder to have an impromptu back-and-forth interaction. 

Feedback mechanisms like text chat can actually distract you from your presentation. Mostly though, the dynamic of sitting at your desk and talking into a microphone while presenting (yet not hearing anyone else) can be disconcerting at least and debilitating at worst until you become practiced at it.

One of the largest reasons for multipoint video within these tools is not so much to see the instructor as a talking head, but for the instructor to see the students and the students to see each other – for class management and to introduce standard social cues into an online class.

For example, when I teach on online class that uses multipoint desktop video, I often “make the rounds” of each participant once in a while, perhaps with a question. Sometime, I find the camera focusing on an “empty seat” – and then I question whether I should give that participant the boot – or at least ask them where they are!

So, when you finally make the jump into real-time conferencing for teaching and staff meetings, keep some of these things in mind. And blow your nose before the conference starts!

Best,

Gary

Hi,

I am not going to use blog.6by7reports.com anymore. I moved to WordPress since I am paying for it already on Yahoo Small Business.

Best,

Gary