Rolandt

(reminder: Join me for my webinar with Jono Bacon tomorrow)

I’ve been impressed by ServiceNow’s Community recently.

It’s clean, well-designed, and answers a large number of questions every day.

The gamification system is worth exploring. Member profiles clearly feature the latest member achievements.

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The community also has the best leaderboard system I’ve seen yet. You can easily find the top 10 members by points gained as we see below.

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But most importantly, you can search the system by points gained in specific topics and forums (and by all-time and the past month). If I want to search for the top expert in a particular topic, I can easily do that and see their overall level.

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There are several major benefits to this.

1) Every member can reach the top rankings. With so many months and so many topics/forums, every member knows if they make an extra effort they can become the topic expert in at least one part of the product/service.

2) It’s easier to find people who can help. You can get granular and find exactly the person you need to help.

3) You can validate someone’s expertise. Being a ServiceNow expert isn’t as useful as being the top expert in the particular issue you’re facing today. You can check the person giving you the answer.

This creates other opportunities too.

Top experts can get notifications of new or unanswered questions in their particular field of expertise. This gives them the first opportunity to solve them (and the motivation to solve them – scarce time).

You can also give awards and prizes for the top members each month or solicit feedback just from the top experts in each category each month.

You can find my current list of feeds I follow on https://zylstra.org/opml/tonzylstra.opml, which I publish as my blogroll. It’s an OPML file that is also readable for human eyes, and can be directly imported into your feed reader. Latest version is from November, I’ll update it later today.

Just got on the NetNewsWire Public iOS beta. It’s free and open source and a good excuse to reboot your RSS habits.Shill me your feeds, please ;)

Benjamin Mayo of 9to5Mac has published an excellent journey down memory lane of Apple’s last decade:

Apple entered the 2010s just as the iPhone began to explode in popularity. The iPhone became the most successful consumer product, ever. Sales surged for another five years and still make up a majority of Apple’s revenues. However, we exit the decade with the iPhone making up a smaller portion of Apple’s business than ever before, as the company diversifies into strong lineups of wearables, tablets and services offerings.

But nothing is a simple straight line. Apple had to graduate through the passing of its founder, juggle relationships with an ever-expanding list of consumer and professional market segments, and adapt to the public attention and scrunity that only comes along as a consequence of being the biggest company in the world. This is a decade in Apple, on one page.

Mayo’s first Apple product was an iMac in 2010, so the timeframe of the decade lines up with his own initial interest in Apple, leading all the way to today, when he’s one of the most prominent Apple reporters. I always enjoy reading Mayo’s perspective on Apple, so it was especially fun getting to hear his personal takes of the biggest moments of the company’s past decade. If you want to spend time basking in the nostalgia of Apple’s last 10 years, Mayo’s story is a great way to do that.

→ Source: 9to5mac.com

With all of the maps of fire in Australia, be sure to check out this piece by Georgina Rannard for BBC News on how some of the maps can easily be misinterpreted when seen out of context.

Tags: BBC, fire

The New York Times zoomed in on southeastern Australia where the fires have hit the worst. They also used small multiples to show the scale of the fires the past few months against previous years.

Tags: Australia, New York Times, wildfire

Archdeacon John Clark writes about the future of the church.

John and I had a long and helpful conversation on Saturday: at one point we shared how, at our core, we are both in the metaphor business. Our framework is different. But we often end up at the same place despite this.

(In his acceptance speech for the Mark Twain Prize, Dave Chappelle touched on a similar notion: he can find common cause with comedians of any stripe as long as they inhabit the art form).

John’s metaphor for the future of the church is a helpful one for me on a personal level; the love I’ve shared with Catherine is, indeed, flexible and strong, quick and enduring. Like tamarack.

The new year is upon us. It’s a time for measuring goals and declaring resolutions. You surely have a series of personal goals, family goals, and business goals. Here’s a humble recommendation you may consider adding to your list of resolutions: communicate better in the workplace.

Time lost to ineffective communication is notoriously difficult to chart in a spreadsheet. But like the ever-turning revolutions of our planet, you may not feel it, but it’s there nonetheless. In this article, you’ll get some stellar tips you can implement right away to stop losing so much of your time on poor digital communications.

1. Don’t Send Open-ended Messages

“Hey guys, I wanted to get a new day planner but not sure what kind. Thoughts?” Sadly, these kinds of open-ended messages are common in today’s workplace. The average knowledge worker drifts across a myriad of instant connectivity channels on which many banal comments, thoughts, and breezy lines of text pass through constantly.

The daily challenge is no longer which MVP tasks will be executed, which will be delegated and which will be deferred, but which communication channels can be safely muted? It’s become increasingly difficult to sustain attention on important tasks while email, Slack, text messages, social media and related channels are competing for your eyeballs.

The problem with open-ended messages is that they tempt you to Act Right Now without much thought or deliberation, usually in service to someone else’s demand for instant gratification. That means there’s little to no legitimate business interest in these short, quick messages. So why are they taking up so much of your time?

• They’re quick to answer (until they start to pile up or lead to longer conversation threads)
• Provide a welcome distraction
• Give the appearance of busyness and participation

You can’t control how your coworkers choose to send messages, but if you’re in a position of leadership over a team, it may be necessary to draft some communication policies. Your first priority must be eliminating open-ended short term communications or at least deferring them to a more appropriate channel for later review (for example, catching up on the #random Slack channel during your lunch break).

There are significant long term benefits in limiting short bursts of text. Mostly, you get higher quality responses. Here’s an example of a high quality email message:

“Team, we’re hoping to decrease bounce rate across our site by introducing more interactive tools (like a bounceback message parser). If you have any ideas, please reply. We will share and discuss results in Friday’s meeting.”

This lets your coworkers know that their help is wanted and their ideas will be given special consideration. This encourages them to take some time (when convenient) to craft high quality responses. Compare this request with it’s short term, open-ended version in Slack: “We need to decrease bounce rate on the site, thoughts?”

Any workers hoping to get a jump on a big project may be thwarted in their thought process to stop and answer this quick message with quick responses. Will those quick responses generate any valuable insights? Likely not.

2. Limit The Back and Forth

Along with creating more detailed, business-like communications, you will want to make sure you’re getting the best output from your correspondents. How you craft your message has more to do with this subtle art than you may think. 

Often, emails and Slack messages open up longer conversation threads. After a few messages, these grow into cumbersome weeds that require further processing and more brain power than you’d hoped to give. So, why not limit all that back and forth?

The best way to eliminate the back and forth is to provide your coworkers with specific deliverables and expectations. Viewed in practice, a deliverable might be a direct answer, a document, or even a short list. No matter what deliverable is best for you, lay it out explicitly in your message.

Imagine you’re inviting a friend to play a game. You don’t want to set your friend up to lose; that would be cheating, and nobody wants to play with a cheater. Rather, let your friends know how the game is won, so they will want to participate to the best of their ability.

For example: “Dave, I’m trying to find out why our bounce rate was higher last quarter and what we can do to fix that this time around. Please take a look back into analytics, find our best bounce rate from last year, and give me a list of five or six things we were doing back then that we’re not doing now.”

Unless the person on the other end has questions, you’re likely to get exactly what you asked for in the very next message simply because you asked for it directly.

3 Use Templates And Models

If you send a lot of messages through email or Slack and find you’re repeating yourself, it can help to have a model or template to follow. Models and templates make it easy to save some mental energy and avoid extra typing.

At BoldGrid, we build a product that helps web designers craft high quality websites in a fraction of the time, so we’re all about efficiency. When we chat with designer clients, we get all sorts of interesting time-saving techniques. The most interesting techniques are always the simplest ones: like using a text expander.

Text expanders let you take a small snippet of text and expand it into a full message with a keyboard shortcut or mouse click. So if you spend hours of your day crafting long messages, think about what text is repeatable and can be offloaded into a text expander.

For example, if you regularly email the same report to your client over and over each week, you can likely offload a lot of typing into your text expander. Dynamic text expansion actually lets you update your snippet with current information, like the date, or even choose from a dropdown menu for custom greetings and signatures. So your client would never know you’re giving them a canned message.

In this case, the text expander application (and there are many of them) serves to hold your templates, and you can easily update them as you go.

But there are more sophisticated templates you can create for virtually any kind of statement, report, or longer document. You may be able to use your favorite text editor or writing app or even your operating system. Templates are a powerful way to save time and energy, so you should take a moment and brainstorm about which repetitive tasks you can import into a templating system.

Saving time and energy with better text communication is not about cutting corners, it’s an investment that pays dividends down the road. By taking a little extra time to save a few minutes here and there, you will save hours over the long term. Use your recovered time to tackle big important tasks and create new value in the new year.

While a Bluetooth tracker is useful for finding your keys or wallet at home, if you want to keep track of your kids or where you left the car, get a cellular GPS tracker. Small enough for you to stow them in a bag or pocket, these devices connect to a cell signal so you can locate them with an app—from nearly any distance. The Samsung SmartThings Tracker (AT&T) is our pick because its battery lasts for days, its tracking is accurate, and it doesn’t require you to be a customer of a specific carrier.

Mozilla is a global community that is building an open and healthy internet. We do so by building products that improve internet life, giving people more privacy, security and control over the experiences they have online. We are also helping to grow the movement of people and organizations around the world committed to making the digital world healthier.

As we grow our ambitions for this work, we are seeking new members for the Mozilla Foundation Board of Directors. The Foundation’s programs focus on the movement building side of our work and complement the products and technology developed by Mozilla Corporation.

What is the role of a Mozilla board member?

I’ve written in the past about the role of the Board of Directors at Mozilla.

At Mozilla, our board members join more than just a board, they join the greater team and the whole movement for internet health. We invite our board members to build relationships with management, employees and volunteers. The conventional thinking is that these types of relationships make it hard for the Executive Director to do his or her job. I wrote in my previous post that “We feel differently”. This is still true today. We have open flows of information in multiple channels. Part of building the world we want is to have built transparency and shared understandings.

It’s worth noting that Mozilla is an unusual organization. We’re a technology powerhouse with broad internet openness and empowerment at its core. We feel like a product organization to those from the nonprofit world; we feel like a non-profit organization to those from the technology industry.

It’s important that our board members understand the full breadth of Mozilla’s mission. It’s important that Mozilla Foundation Board members understand why we build consumer products, why it happens in the subsidiary and why they cannot micro-manage this work. It is equally important that Mozilla Corporation Board members understand why we engage in the open internet activities of the Mozilla Foundation and why we seek to develop complementary programs and shared goals.

What are we looking for?

Last time we opened our call for board members, we created a visual role description. Below is an updated version reflecting the current needs for our Mozilla Foundation Board.

Here is the full job description: https://mzl.la/MoFoBoardJD

Here is a short explanation of how to read this visual:

• In the vertical columns, we have the particular skills and expertise that we are looking for right now. We expect new board members to have at least one of these skills.
• The horizontal lines speaks to things that every board member should have. For instance, to be a board member, you should have to have some cultural sense of Mozilla. They are a set of things that are important for every candidate. In addition, there is a set of things that are important for the board as a whole. For instance, international experience. The board makeup overall should cover these areas.
• The horizontal lines will not change too much over time, whereas the vertical lines will change, depending on who joins the Board and who leaves.

Finding the right people who match these criteria and who have the skills we need takes time. We hope to have extensive discussions with a wide range of people. Board candidates will meet the existing board members, members of the management team, individual contributors and volunteers. We see this as a good way to get to know how someone thinks and works within the framework of the Mozilla mission. It also helps us feel comfortable including someone at this senior level of stewardship.

We want your suggestions

We are hoping to add three new members to the Mozilla Foundation Board of Directors over the next 18 months. If you have candidates that you believe would be good board members, send them to msurman@mozillafoundation.org. We will use real discretion with the names you send us.

This looks interesting. Found via colleague Willy Tadema (blog in Dutch).

Machine learning algorithms usually operate as black boxes and it is unclear how they derived a certain decision. This book is a guide for practitioners to make machine learning decisions interpretable.

I’m intrigued by Zettelkasten, that Roel Groeneveld describes in his blog. Zettelkasten means filing cards cabinet, so in and of itself isn’t anything novel. It’s all in the described process of course, which originates with systems thinker Niklas Luhmann. I recognise the utility of having lots of small notes, and the ability to link them like beads on a necklace, which is much like the ‘threading cards‘ I mentioned here recently. A personal knowledge management process is extremely important, and needs to be supported by the right tools. Specifically for more easily getting from loose notions, to emergent patterns, to new constructs. Balancing stock and flow. Zettelkasten coming from a paper age seems rather focused on stock though, and pays less attention to flow. Crucially it encourages links between notes, a flow-like aspect, but to me often the links carry more meaning and knowledge than the notes/nodes it connects. The reason for linking, the association that makes a link apparent is an extremely valuable piece of info. Not sure how that would find its place in the Zettelkasten process, as while links exist, they’re not treated as a thing of meaning in their own right. Also some of the principles of the process described, especially atomicity, seem prone to creating lots of overhead by having to rework notes taken during a day. That type of reworking is I think best done in the style of gardening: when you are searching for something, or passing through some notes anyway, you can add, change, link, split off etc.

Tossed out filing card cabinets of the Manchester City Library (NH/USA), image license CC BY SA

In terms of tools, I am on the look out for something other than Evernote that I currently use. What I like about it is that it ‘eats anything’ and a note can be an image, text, web page, book, pdf, or a drawing, which I can add tags to, and can access through scripts from e.g. my todo tool, etc. Zettelkasten is fully text based in contrast. As a strong point that means it can be completely created from plain text files, if you have a tool that allows you to create, edit, search and put them in an overview extremely fast. But very often ideas are contained in images as well, so dealing with media is key I think. The Zettelkasten tool The Archive is worth a try, but lacks precisely this type of media support. Devonthink on the other hand is way over the top, and let’s one loose oneself in its complexity. The Archive keeps things simple, which is much better, but maybe too simple.

The Jabra Elite 85h is our favorite pair of Bluetooth headphones because the intuitive operation and comfortable fit make it a pleasure in everyday use. These over-ear headphones are delightfully uncomplicated, with easy pairing and clear, simple controls. And they’re versatile performers, offering great sound, clear calls, active noise cancelling, long battery life, and water resistance.

Mozilla is a global community that is building an open and healthy internet. We do so by building products that improve internet life, giving people more privacy, security and control over the experiences they have online. We are also helping to grow the movement of people and organizations around the world committed to making the digital world healthier.

As we grow our ambitions for this work, we are seeking new members for the Mozilla Foundation Board of Directors. The Foundation’s programs focus on the movement building side of our work and complement the products and technology developed by Mozilla Corporation.

What is the role of a Mozilla board member?

I’ve written in the past about the role of the Board of Directors at Mozilla.

At Mozilla, our board members join more than just a board, they join the greater team and the whole movement for internet health. We invite our board members to build relationships with management, employees and volunteers. The conventional thinking is that these types of relationships make it hard for the Executive Director to do his or her job. I wrote in my previous post that “We feel differently”. This is still true today. We have open flows of information in multiple channels. Part of building the world we want is to have built transparency and shared understandings.

It’s worth noting that Mozilla is an unusual organization. We’re a technology powerhouse with broad internet openness and empowerment at its core. We feel like a product organization to those from the nonprofit world; we feel like a non-profit organization to those from the technology industry.

It’s important that our board members understand the full breadth of Mozilla’s mission. It’s important that Mozilla Foundation Board members understand why we build consumer products, why it happens in the subsidiary and why they cannot micro-manage this work. It is equally important that Mozilla Corporation Board members understand why we engage in the open internet activities of the Mozilla Foundation and why we seek to develop complementary programs and shared goals.

What are we looking for?

Last time we opened our call for board members, we created a visual role description. Below is an updated version reflecting the current needs for our Mozilla Foundation Board.

Here is the full job description: https://mzl.la/MoFoBoardJD

Here is a short explanation of how to read this visual:

• In the vertical columns, we have the particular skills and expertise that we are looking for right now. We expect new board members to have at least one of these skills.
• The horizontal lines speaks to things that every board member should have. For instance, to be a board member, you should have to have some cultural sense of Mozilla. They are a set of things that are important for every candidate. In addition, there is a set of things that are important for the board as a whole. For instance, international experience. The board makeup overall should cover these areas.
• The horizontal lines will not change too much over time, whereas the vertical lines will change, depending on who joins the Board and who leaves.

Finding the right people who match these criteria and who have the skills we need takes time. We hope to have extensive discussions with a wide range of people. Board candidates will meet the existing board members, members of the management team, individual contributors and volunteers. We see this as a good way to get to know how someone thinks and works within the framework of the Mozilla mission. It also helps us feel comfortable including someone at this senior level of stewardship.

We want your suggestions

We are hoping to add three new members to the Mozilla Foundation Board of Directors over the next 18 months. If you have candidates that you believe would be good board members, send them to msurman@mozillafoundation.org. We will use real discretion with the names you send us.

The post Expanding Mozilla’s Boards in 2020 appeared first on The Mozilla Blog.

If you've ever wondered how the London Underground lines got their names, this will tell you. No new non-royalty-named lines in 87 years - we are an unimaginative bunch. Maybe better than Liney McLine Face?

Shirts. Pants. Socks and underwear. Toiletries. A good book. Your phone charger. Your passport. That’s everything, right? What are you forgetting? Oh, yeah: a great camera.

Every year or so a friend or family member will reach out to me and ask about starting a podcast. I’ve started a few podcasts and have a modicum of experience in this domain, so here’s my standard advice…

First off, should you start a podcast?

Answer: YES!

My only exception to this would be if you’re 2 or 3 white guys and you’re planning on doing a podcast about Apple products. Not to punch down on white guys, but this is well-trodden territory.

If you’re an underrepresented minority and it’s an industry-specific podcast, then my answer is: DOUBLE YES!! If you’re planning a new show, consider including underrepresented voices, it can only be beneficial to have broader and more diverse perspectives.

Podcasting 101: Your first season

Okay. Hopefully that convinced you. Let’s start a podcast! Here’s what you need to know about getting started.

1. Write down a list of ~50 show ideas. I think I stole this from Gary Vaynerchuck’s book Crush It. But if it’s a sustainable idea, then you should have no trouble coming up with content. You can diverge from this list, but it’s a good compass and you can share it with friends to find out if your ideas are interesting or compelling.
2. Figure out your formula. How’s the show going to work? What’s the formula? Are you a 30-minute show? A 1-hour show? Topics? Q&A? Turn on the mic and go? There’s a handful of paths and approaches you can take here.
3. Record 10 episodes. You’ve got your list of ideas, you’ve got your formula, now record! Do whatever it takes to get to 10 episodes. These 10 are probably not going to be great as you get your footing and find your voice. They’re almost throw away. The 10 episode mark is a great place to re-evaluate your formula, upgrade your equipment, add a theme song, tweak audio quality, start selling ads, or abandon the show altogether.
4. Consistency > Quality. This may be a sad fact of podcasting. But consistency, showing up every week, is probably two or three times more important than quality of content. Blocking out time to record in your schedule is super important. This also helps with scheduling guests because you can firmly say “we record at such and such time” and saves a lot of “let’s find a good time for everybody to record” hassle.

These all feed into each other. Having a formula and a list of ideas helps you maintain consistency and power through the trough of disillusionment. Find what works for you and you can even experiment a bit as well.

One giant caveat is: Maybe you decide your show’s formula is only 5 episodes. That’s awesome, some of my favorite podcasts are just single arcs. More recently, I’ve been listening quite a few “short run” seasons like Scene on Radio’s Men, Dolly Parton’s America, Finding Fred, Marvel’s Wolverine, and Serial: Season 3. Temporal podcasts (as opposed to endless podcasts) are a valid and enjoyable format.

Equipment

Abide in this simple rule: Decent mic, working headphones, quiet room, good internet

Audio stuff can get expensive. There’s a lot of advice out there on what to get. I’ve settled on a pretty minimal setup that dollar-for-quality is a pretty good deal and will make you feel like a podcaster which is the most important thing.

1. Rode NT-USB Microphone. I like this microphone a lot. It was originally my travel mic, but now it’s my day-to-day mic. Buy Now
2. Sony MDR-7506 Studio Headphones. Any headphones work but I have nothing but good things to say about these headphones. Buy Now
3. Rode PSA1 Swivel Mount Boom Arm. If you want to reduce echo without carpeting your walls, get a boom stand for your microphone. Pull the mic close to your face like a radio person and dial in your audio levels. Buy Now

Hell hath no fury like an audiophile scorned. If you have bad audio, you’ll hear about it from listeners. To be fair to people who groan on Twitter, your podcast goes directly in someone’s ear or is played in a car that’s plagued by traffic and road noise, so it’s important to get a good crisp sound.

How to record

The “Industry Standard” for the best sound quality is have everyone capture their own audio. You share those large files in a Dropbox and an audio whiz mixes that audio down in an app like GarageBand, Audacity, Adobe Audition, or Logic. This adds a technical hurdle, but everyone recording their own audio increases quality and avoids potential issues like robot-voice from Skype audio compression or Internet connection drops.

QuickTime on Mac and Voice Recorder on Windows 10 are great options for local audio capture because most people already have this installed. A short countdown before everyone hits record helps the audio all line up when mixing it down.

On Aside Quest, we have been flirting with web-based options like Zencaster where everyone joins a room and with 1-click we capture everyone’s audio and with a couple other clicks I have a levelled audio file ready to ship out. As expected with web based software, we’ve had a few technical issues where everything didn’t go as planned and audio was lost. But if you want something as easy as sending a link and are willing to take a slight risk, these solutions might be perfect. I know other podcasts that broadcast their Zoom call to Twitch or YouTube and snag the audio from the broadcast and/or the Zoom call. It’s all about finding your quality vs. risk vs. ease of use comfort zone.

Hosting

Now that you have an audio file, where do you put it so everyone gets it? Well, you need a website. More specifically, you need an RSS feed to syndicate your show to iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, and other various podcatchers of choice.

You can run a podcast off your own self-hosted site (WordPress/Gatsby/whatever). This works great. But with audio files averaging around 40mb each per listener per episode, you might rack up quite a hosting bill. Entry level web hosting or S3 buckets start getting expensive.

That’s why I can truly recommend modern podcast hosting services like Simplecast and Transistor. They give you a basic website, an RSS feed, an interface for uploading your episodes, and an analytics dashboard to help you grow your podcast. It costs some money each month, but hey, it’s a hobby and hobbies cost money! It’s a great way to dip your toe into podcasting without having to manage a whole danged website too.

Guests

Guests are a great idea to inject some variety and expertise into a show. But bringing another guest in can sometimes overcomplicate things. On Shop Talk, we send guests notes before recording to make it go as smooth as possible.

1. Interviewing: Interviewing isn’t as intuitive as it seems. It’s tough not to sound like Chris Farley on The Chris Farley Show. I recorded over 100 episodes before I even started feeling comfortable interviewing. My only advice here is write questions down.
2. Let the guest know you’ve started recording or broadcasting: This is courtesy and guests can feel betrayed if you don’t go thru consent steps. We do a big “3-2-1… Record!” countdown ceremony.
3. Stay in their wheelhouse: It’s going to be a better show when the guest appears and feels knowledgeable.
4. Minimize Banter: Get to the point of the show as quickly as possible.
   1. Keep housekeeping short. Some housekeeping is inevitable, but try to keep the sponsors, excuses, whatever to a minimum especially when a guest is awkwardly waiting to hop into the conversation.
   2. Don’t talk about the weather: It’s so tempting to open with casual conversation. Unless the weather is a “character” or important influence on the show (big season change or nearby forest fire that effects the mood), best to skip this part.
   3. Don’t discuss the guest’s accent: People talk differently. Listeners will notice this. No need to bring it up (unless its Canada because that’s hilarious).
   4. “Why don’t you tell us about yourself; who you are and what you do?”: After a soft introduction, this is the easiest way to put the focus on the guest, let them establish themselves and their expertise. The earlier you ask this, the better in my experience.

Sponsorships

Sponsorships for podcasts is a tough one and probably worth it’s own book of posts. In my experience, advertisers don’t fall out of the sky unless you’re of a certain size. My only practical advice here would be: Share stats and create space. Setting an expectation for potential or future advertisements for your listeners will prevent fallout if you suddenly go from no-ads to complete sellout. Beyond that, you have to figure out which monetization strategy best fits your show and your audience:

1. NPR/Patreon Route: Be listener supported. Maybe offer swag or access to a private community on Discord or Slack. It’s hard to convert listeners to active contributors unless the incentive package is good.
2. Jumbotrons: One of my favorite podcasts, My Brother, My Brother, and Me, did “Jumbotron” ads which I think are great. For $10/20/100, the hosts read a custom ad from a listener (for another podcast, a marriage proposal, whatever). This is good if you have a strong community. A lot of Twitch streamers have this model too, for X number of bits, a message will appear in-stream.
3. Sell Your Own Thing: Lots of podcasters have a related digital product (app, service, ebook, online learning course) they promote in lieu of advertisements. This can be “salesy” but also puts money directly into your pocket.
4. Show-by-show Ad Sales: For every X number of shows you have X number of ad slots and it’s first come first serve. This is probably the best way to make good money, especially if your show has a specific industry or is in high demand.
5. Buy Outs: Have a new season or arc of episodes? Maybe work on pitching one company to buy out the whole season in advance is the best strategy. You maybe sacrifice some money in the unlikely event your podcast is a runaway success, but at least your means were met. The most famous example of this is probably Mail…kiimp?’s buy-out of Serial: Season 1. I like this strategy.

Additional FAQ

1. Listener counts: Most podcasts have under 100 listeners. And that’s fine. Don’t get discouraged by that. Growing a podcast is hard work.
2. Drinking: I love a good drinking podcast. “Drinking + Microphones” is a pretty common podcasting formula. It’s important to remember your audience probably has not been drinking. You’re coming in at a ten, everything is funny to you, and might not be as hilarious for your listener. Even pros get this wrong. One time the McElroy Brothers ate edibles, got super high, and recorded a show and it was borderline unlistenable, but… it was also the beginning of The McElroy Brothers will be in Trolls 2 which is the greatest subarc to a podcast ever… so what do I know.

This is some hard earned advice but let’s be real, it’s podcasting. It’s an entirely decentralized form of media and there are no rules whatsoever. Lots of podcasts break all these rules and succeed. That’s what makes podcasting great; each podcast has the potential to bring something unique to this lawless medium.

Hope this advice helps and happy podcasting!

I like this.

Monday (1.6.20) Evan Williams wrote this:

One the first URLs I remember being in the habit of checking (in the late ’90s) multiple times a day was scripting.com. Dave Winer pioneered the blogging form, as well as many of the tools and technologies — and he’s still at it. Writing every day about everything from politics to the tech behind his blog. Amazing.

Tuesday (1.7.20) Dave Winer wrote this:

I appreciate the shout out yesterday from Evan Williams, a former competitor who has gone on to make billions as co-founder of Twitter. It’s nice that he still reads my blog, even though I have said some critical things about Medium, but all in the spirit of trying to make the web work better. Hope they have been received that way. I learned from reading his post that he has moved to New York. I think that’s a good move, from San Francisco, which as a born-and-bred NYer has always seemed really small to me. Of course I’ve now moved to a much much smaller place. Anyway Ev if you’re reading this, thanks for the kind words.

Like I said, I like this.

It strikes me as wrong that many applications don’t make very clear where and in which format they store the information you create in them. Tools that don’t obviously create files (like word processors) I mean. Installed half a dozen note taking tools in the past days, and for only 1 can I easily establish where notes from those tools end up.

Given the geopolitical significance of handling data, as well as the ‘nothing about me without me’ demands increasingly made of data handling, I am at the point that if an application or service does not explicitly and obviously tell you where information is stored both on your device and in the cloud, and in which way and/or formats, it must be treated as destructive of agency, malicious maybe even, and certainly as untrustwothy.

For those new to visualization, learning all of the methods, implementations, tools, and guidelines can seem like a daunting task. Not to mention everything that happens before the actual visualizing, such as analysis, data formatting, and context-making. You don't have to learn it all at once. Read More

Needless to say, I don't structure my papers this way. Never have, never will. That said, I can see the logic of the structure and have no problem recommending it to others. There's an especially helpful diagram part way through the paper that describes the structure. Basically the idea is: summarize what other people know and find a problem; gather and analyze some data to address the problem; summarize the gap filled by your work and outline its limitations. So, why don't I use this method? It's hard to explain - my 'data' is my newsletter, which I can't really summarize. Also, I'm never working on one idea at a time. No piece of my work should be viewed outside the context of all the rest of my work; it's all one big work. And I'm not interested in problems so much as I am interested in new ways of seeing and imagining possibilities. Maybe that makes me a bad scientist? Perhaps - but it's what I do.

Samuel Groß from Google's Project Zero has a great writeup on a remote iOS exploit (which is fixed in the latest updates from Apple). I'm linking to part 2 of this writeup, because there is a ton of interesting technical information about how the exploit worked, which includes Objective-C tagged pointers and memory leaks in NSKeyedUnarchiver.

Memory leaks in system frameworks have always bugged me (most recently: FB7482388), but it had never crossed my mind they could be security vulnerabilities. It makes sense now that I think about it.

Toronto’s proposed electric vehicle (EV) strategy aims to make all of the city’s transportation electric by 2050, as reported by The Toronto Star.

The proposed strategy was sent to Toronto’s city council infrastructure committee for approval on January 9th.

It aims to boost the current number of electric vehicles from 0.6 percent to five percent by 2025, 20 percent by 2030 and then 80 percent by 2040. The strategy states that the plan is critical in delivering city council’s promise to fight climate change, as vehicles currently account for around 30 percent of the city’s greenhouse gas emissions.

The strategy notes that to reach these goals, there needs to be more public charging stations along with on-street residential plug-in stations for people who don’t have driveways.

Sarah Buchanan, a program manager at Environmental Defence who participated in consultations, told The Toronto Star that the proposal is “ambitious and solid.”

“My concern is implementation — how serious city council is about taking all those steps, because some of them have a price tag upfront,” she said. Buchanan said that the city will require help from other governments, and that the Ford government doesn’t plan to increase electric vehicle ownership.

Data from Electric Mobility Canada released last month showed that electric vehicle sales in Ontario are plummeting following the Progressive Conservative government’s decision to cancel a rebate last year.

Source: The Toronto Star 

The post Toronto’s proposed EV strategy aims to make all transportation electric by 2050 appeared first on MobileSyrup.

A new report from a Morgon Stanly analyst states that HP will soon move away from selling printer ink at high prices.

To make this shift, the company will begin charging more for its printers as a way to balance out its income.

Since the world is moving away from paper, it makes sense that HP needs to switch its printer revenue model.

Currently, HP and most other printer companies currently sell printers at lower prices but then hike up the cost of ink to recoup the lost revenue from printer sales over the long term.

Since many people don’t print every day anymore, it seems like companies are having a more difficult time recouping their money from selling printers for low prices.

This might be good for consumers since there’s a possibility higher printer prices will result in better printers that fail less and last longer. Also, more reasonably priced ink cartridges definitely isn’t a bad thing.

Source: Gizmodo

The post HP will stop overcharging for printer ink according to analyst appeared first on MobileSyrup.

Hisense is showing off a prototype smartphone with a colour e-ink display at CES 2020.

Last year, the company showed off a smartphone with an e-ink screen, but this year, the company has added a bit of colour. Currently, Hisense hasn’t revealed much about the prototype handset; however, according to GSMArena, the device offers improved contrasts and a better refresh rate compared to last year’s black and white A5.

Hisense introduced the world’s very first Color E Ink screen reading mobile phone crisp at #CES2020 which officially kicked off on Tuesday, providing an eye-friendly display for mobile reading people. pic.twitter.com/y9HJNro4t0

— Hisense (@HisenseGlobal) January 9, 2020

Additionally, this e-ink smartphone will reportedly go into mass production in the second quarter of the year, but HiSense hasn’t said exactly when it’ll officially reveal more about the handset.

An e-ink display helps with eye-strain and makes words more legible, but they tend to suffer from a lower refresh rate. Typically e-readers with e-ink displays don’t need a high refresh rate, but a smartphone where you’re watching videos, streaming the web and sometimes playing games, the lower refresh rate is quite noticeable.

Further, an e-ink display could help the phone save with on battery.

What’s also worth noting that there’s a 5G sign above the device, which means that it’s possible Hisense may want to launch a 4G and 5G variations.

When this phone does launch, it’s likely it will not be available in Canada.

Source: GSMArena

The post Hisense shows off smartphones with coloured e-ink screens at CES 2020 appeared first on MobileSyrup.

A Compiler Writing Journey

Warren Toomey has been writing a self-compiling compiler for a subset of C, and extensively documenting every step of the journey here on GitHub. The result is an extremely high quality free textbook on compiler construction.

Via Hacker News

In the end you think about the beginning. I remember sweaters so thick you could use them as blankets, each one made by hand. I remember getting blackberry pie for my birthday instead of cake because she knew that was my favorite, and how she would make a separate batch of hamburger patties for me because I didn’t like them with onions. I remember her driving an hour and a half each way to night school to get her teaching degree while raising four kids, and how much she enjoyed reading biographies, and knowing that she loved me even when I thought no one else did. I remember how much she enjoyed fresh cut flowers, and going back to San Francisco for the first time in 65 years, and how proud she was of her children and grandchildren.

The happiest moment of her life was when the doctor told her that her youngest son was going to survive his cancer; the saddest came years later when she learned that she was going to outlive her daughter. She taught hundreds of children to read, to clean up after themselves, and to hug their friends when they were sad, and I think she believed that the world would be a better place if everyone would do those three simple things.

Goodbye, Mum. I know you were ready to leave, but I wasn’t ready to say goodbye. I’m going to miss you so much.

Doris Wilson
July 22, 1927 - January 7, 2020