“Once you realize how search engines work, there’s a great temptation to give them what they want by pumping up the keywords in your text, adding hidden keywords on your pages, etc. The problem with this approach is that search engines know people do this, and they’re continually working on ways to identify and eliminate it. Remember ‘meta tags’? Site owners used to pump these full of keywords in order to get more search traffic, until the search engines caught on and dramatically reduced their importance in the ranking process. If you build your site around the idea that you can throw on some cologne instead of taking a shower, you can only get so far before every realizes you’re just posing.”

Advertising news, ideas, crits, etc…

“There’s a common and weird conception in this country of The Great Idea. This is the idea of PageRank, a graphical user interface, or sticky notes. Huge successes, right? Sure. But for 99% of people, The Great Idea is a big fat myth.”

“It’s a funny thing. After almost twenty years of drawing a paycheque for creating software, people generally want to hire me because they want me to duplicate the successes I’ve had. The model seems to be ‘do the things you’ve done successfully before, and you’ll be successful now.’ My experience is that this has never worked on its own. Success in software development is at least as much about avoiding failure modes as it is about ‘best practices.’”

“Venture capitalists are simple people: we’ve either decided to invest, and we are convincing ourselves that our gut is right (aka, ‘due diligence’) or there’s not a chance in hell. While we may be simple, we’re not necessarily forthcoming, so if you think it’s hard to get a ‘yes’ out of venture capitalist, you should try to get a conclusive ‘no.’”

“(Since I’ve antagonized the venture capital community with last week’s blog, I thought I would complete the picture and ‘out’ entrepreneurs to begin this week. The hard part about writing this blog was narrowing down these lies to ten.) I get pitched dozens of times every year, and every pitch contains at least three or four of these lies. I provide them not because I believe I can increase the level of honesty of entrepreneurs as much as to help entrepreneurs come up with new lies. At least new lies indicate a modicum of creativity!”

“I attended Steve’s keynote address at Macworld Expo San Francisco this morning, and I took a picture of most of the slides that he used. I couldn’t capture them all because of the special effects he was using. You can read about these announcements all over the place, but here’s a good summary on MacNN. Admittedly, from a photographic sense, my pictures will win no awards. However, I put them in a loop, so that people can see how one of the world’s greatest speakers uses a presentation product (ie, Keynote). Click here to get the loop. As opposed to the 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint, Steve uses the 125 (or so) slides/90 minutes/60 point font rule. :-) But then again, the rules are different for Steve. Here are ten lessons to learn from his keynote…”

“Regardless of presenting style, those of us who use Microsoft PowerPoint must adhere to the elemental rule that when you present, slides must be moved forward. Yes, there are still some presenters who advance their PowerPoint slides by pushing the space bar or the arrow key on their laptops. But presenting this way chains a presenter to the podium or table on which the laptop sits. A better option is to advance your slides with a remote control device, preferably your own.”

Again and again I run across quotes from people who most would consider geniuses in their field that offer variations on this same theme — ‘I learn most from screwing up.’ … Not only are mistakes a great source of insight that we can apply to next steps in our journey, sometimes they’re absolutely required to make us stop and listen.”

There are companies I review every day that I don’t write about. Reasons vary — it’s been done already and the product isn’t even as good as what’s been done, it’s a mostly or totally one-way application, or it isn’t consumer focused (or have implications for consumer focused applications). Even with this filtering, I get flame comments on some of the stuff I do choose to write about as ‘not worthy’. But there are a number of companies and/or products that I would like to write about but don’t exist. I’ve been keeping a list over the last few months and I am posting it now.”

“I’m happy for individuals who start working on something they love as a pet project, never intending it to make money, and end up selling it to one of the usual suspects for $30 million. That’s terrific. But if you’re deliberately planning to quit your day job and start a business from scratch, why go with a zero-revenue model that’s going to be sold for $50 million tops when you could pick a business model with the potential to generate some really, really serious cash? Once you’re bringing in $50m+ in revenue, then flip your company.”

“Here is a sequence of events that is familiar to us from our research, and may be familiar to you as well. A CEO announces that the strategic imperative for the upcoming year is breakthrough growth. Incremental growth from incremental initiatives is no longer enough. To continue to thrive, the company must do new things. It must break all of the rules. It must redefine the industry… And then the CEO makes a big mistake.”

“There’s a saying, those who can’t do, teach. Unfortunately, the same can often be said of management. (And those who can’t manage, consult? But let’s leave that for another essay…) In any case, I’ve often complained long and bitterly about software project management, and a coworker once responded, ‘Phil, you’re always right’. I don’t know if he was serious, but in the spirit of that encouraging or sarcastic endorsement, here are my recommended practices for managing software projects.”

“Some of those on the list are well-known names from very large companies, who have made decisions that bring the mass customization model to their existing customers. Others will be well known among the ‘mass customization community’ (those people who carry out research relating to mass customization, in the same way that early management writers studied ’scientific management’ and the then-newfangled idea of ‘mass production’), but perhaps are not well-known in the wider business world. And there are those who, simply by virtue of their work or position, are opening up new possibilities for products and services based around the individual, inverting the conventional wisdom of making a product and then trying to find customers that fit.”

“You’d think marketing candidates would be smart enough not to submit a resume when they are looking for a job. Why hasn’t this lame method of job hunting fallen by the wayside? Nobody writes a resume that says what they do. Nobody enjoys reading a resume.”