I am a complete convert. I’m one of the lucky Australian’s who travel to the USA on a reasonably regular basis so I picked up mine in San Francisco a few weeks ago, giving me time now to try the device and explore how it fits into my professional and personal life.

I know we’ve been looking forward to a paperless world since the first personal computers arrived on the scene several decades ago. The opposite is of course the reality – all we’ve done is invent ever increasingly efficient methods to spit yet more reams of dead tree out of ever faster printers and copiers.

Over the past year or two I have been making a concerted effort to reduce the amount of paper on my desk. My adoption of Evernote last year has substantially helped, I now keep all my work notes, documents and other information in this marvellous organiser.

And now with my iPad purchase I’m rallying the paperless troops once more. I’m deliberately not taking a notebook or work papers to meetings. I have everything already in Evernote, and then take notes directly into my iPad during the meeting – which by default has made me the minute taker. Everyone seems quite impressed as I hit the email button at the conclusion of the meeting and send them my notes.

The Australian's iPad app has sold 4,500 copies so far.

I have heard criticism of the iPad keyboard – Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer last week claimed the iPad was “a different form factor PC”. “A guy tried to take notes on one in a meeting with me yesterday – that was fun,” he said. “The meeting didn’t go very fast.”

I’m sorry Steve, you might be vastly richer than I, but you’re just plain wrong. Maybe it’s just a case of being pissed off that Microsoft, despite playing with tablet operating software versions of Windows never truly created a ground-shifting device. Maybe the projected 10 million iPad sales are ramming home to him the missed business opportunity.

My take on the iPad is two-fold:

1. The iPad represents a whole new class of content creation opportunity. It’s easy to use in that particular Apple way (by which I mean, it’s Apple’s way or the highway). There are a myriad of apps already available to help you draw, write, paint, mash up and compose content. Without having to cart around a laptop, and with the 3G service, anywhere at anytime.
2. The iPad represents a whole new class of content delivery opportunity. Oh we’ve done the whole ‘newspapers are dying dinosaurs’ thing, the reality without question is that there will always be printed publications. But the general malaise affecting the old-style news print models will continue as more people choose to source their news and opinion through alternative channels.

The smart publishers are jumping on board the iPad wagon, hoping to ride the coattails. And early mover status probably isn’t a bad thing. It gives you chance to explore models, try variations and consider possibilities whilst the audience is still relatively small, and still learning itself.

I’ve tried a number of ‘news’ apps on my iPad including:

1. The Australian – I think they took a look at the Wall Street Journal when it comes to layout and functionality. But it does the job, signing up was quick and easy, the interface is fine.
2. Wall Street Journal – an ‘early adopter’, they were featured in Steve Jobs’ iPad launch speech earlier this year. Their app is comprehensive and subscription based beyond an initial free period. I find it slightly tedious having to wait for the downloads to occur, but other than that it works well. They’ve sold 10,000 apps on a $US18 a month subscription.
3. Financial Times – it’s a great app, although given their financial markets focus, not so relevant to my daily life. They’ve gone for a similar layout as the WSJ, but with a more fluid scrolling screen, whereas the WSJ (and the Australian) try and contain each page to the dimensions of the iPad screen.
4. Wired Magazine – the leading light, their iPad version of the magazine is a complete delight, audio and video is embedded, the whole magazine layout and content has been re-purposed whilst retaining the distinctive Wire design.
5. BBC – basically a video clip app, allowing you to watch news videos across a range of topics and regions. They don’t update all the time (although you can listen to the BBC world service radio streaming), there are only a few videos in each category. But it’s a slick and effective content delivery mechanism that will improve as they devote more resource to populating the content.

An honourable mention to the Guardian Eyewitness app – not strictly a news application, rather it delivers a single photo each day to your iPad. But what a photo! It’s especially selected as being the particularly thought provoking image of the day from the Guardian’s extensive photo journalism resources.

And a raspberry, well raspberry in waiting anyway, to my home town’s own The Age. I have The Age’s app because it appeared on the app store for a few hours a week or so ago. It’s since disappeared, apparently it was only made available for a short time so the company’s managers and executives could give it a try. I sincerely hope the reason it hasn’t officially been released is because they are working their little geeky butts off completely rewriting the app. It’s woeful. It looks like they simply replicated their iPhone application, right down to the web-based sign up pages. It’s clunky, completely counter-intuitive, and a mess. There, does that make my views plain?

It’s also worth taking a look at some of the RSS feed readers, because several of them aim to mimic the newspaper experience, and a couple do a great job, check out Early Edition or for a lighter, faster experience try Sources.

The iPad represents a brave new world for content creators and consumers. The iPad’s ability to meld a true multi-media experience, in a device that can be used anywhere, combined with its content creation capability, will define a new marketplace, and change others.

Finally, if you were sceptical of the iPad’s ability to do anything, anywhere, I think news that dolphins are using iPads to communicate with humans may force you over from the dark side to see the iPad light.

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One formula I thoroughly detest is the inappropriate use of a list. Usually the post starts with a description of a problem you have (even if you don’t have this particular problem) and then proceeds with a way too long list on what you should do to solve it. I find these list posts akin to interfering people who search around looking for others they can wedge in on and share their advice with. Often the advice is meaningless, useless and if actually followed, can have downright dangerous consequences for the recipient.

This is why when scanning a blog post today from Free Pursuits I was pleasantly bowled over with what I believe anyway, a blog post should really be about. A straight up pointing out of the ‘elephant in the room’ or ‘the emperor with no clothes’. The post is by Ashley Ambirge and is a guest post for Free Pursuits as Ashley actually has her own blog called The Middle Finger Project.

The Dream Protection Plan, smart words to keep the Dream Zappers at bay

Ah,what a breathe of fesh air! How long have we all been captive to those folk who have no restraint in sharing their inappropriate views on our lives and our ideas? And, for once, while there is a short list in there, Ashley does not follow the ‘list post formula’. The post is called The Smart Ass Guide to Dealing with Dream Zappers.

There are quite a few gems in this post, but one that jumped straight off the page for me was Ashley’s countering of the usual trotted out argument by the well-meaning brigade when one of us dares complain about another person’s trashing or belittling of something that’s important to us – that we should not take it personally. Hang on, what’s this about, don’t take it personally? Life is personal. Being a human being is personal – there’s actually nothing ‘not personal’ about the way other people treat us and the way we respond to it – wake up, it’s all personal!

I remember many times in corporate and then later when David and I were hawking around the business plan for SeekCulture.com (which eventually evolved into the business – Arts Hub) when I would come up against a particularly obnoxious individual who saw it as their business to reform my whole life according to their world views and ideologies. Admittedly, these were usually much older folk and looking back now, I can see they were also the manifestly unsuccessful. The successful of their generation were busy getting on with the enormous workload they carried and bringing up their families – they certainly didn’t have time to go on the hunt to undermine and as Ashley Ambirge would say Dream Zap the next generation of workers, thinkers and managers.

But every now and then these Dream Zappers appeared in the guise of a generational contemporary. In our book, Niche Content Millionaire, David and I share bluntly one of the most undermining experiences we had in the very early days of the Arts Hub experience, when a couple of investment managers at a government-funded business incubator we’d (unfortunately) joined took us through a journey where they built us up to expect funding and then at the last minute revised their dialogue and expressed that we weren’t really investment-ready, or what they were looking for. Now, when you read Niche Content Millionaire you’ll find out that there was a rather devious hidden agenda going on here. But wait a minute, what sort of person feels they have the right to waste the time of another and through their actions or words, take a well-aimed zap at their dreams?

Not someone you want to know is my view!

As you can probably tell just writing about this topic of the underminers, belittlers, the Dream Zappers makes me seethe and is a reminder to me that in the last 5 to 6 years anyway, I’ve been incredibly fortunate in that I’ve been able to mainly avoid or just dump a Dream Zapper. Indeed this is even true of the extended family who at various times have all shown themselves to be really brilliant, highly accomplished Dream Zappers. A little distance and time not spent with them has resulted in more courteous and respectful relationships – the interference, undermining and shooting down has ceased, even if they all secretly still sit there thinking about how they can take us down a peg, the thing is no-one feels free to actually try do this anymore.

Ashley has a few interesting retorts to Dream Zapper comments in her post and I’m in firm agreement with her that in life it’s best to have a few of these retorts ready. I have no idea why, but some people will take it as an affront that you are going about your life setting your goals and dreams, and working away like a navvy to achieve them. Their preference is that you don’t get to your dream, that you in some way fall short so that their negative view is vindicated. These people exist, they are real, so why not prepare yourself for when a Dream Zapper appears on your horizon with a list of fabulous retorts to their common putdowns?

What would you say to someone who told you your dream was not practical? Could you make it funny and educative at the same time without being offensive, but letting the Dream Zapper know for future reference that you will not be toyed with? Or hey, why not plain just offend them? It’s not like they’ve taken your feelings into account is it!

I ask this because I’m aware that as we head off to the holiday season many of us will be exposed to people at parties and functions who don’t know us and don’t support us and may take potshots at what we have to say and share. Maybe so many awful things happen with families at Christmas because people feel too free to be overly-familiar, to give advice, to share their opinion about others.

I’m not going to write you a list, but I am going to suggest that as a New Year’s Resolution you do some really active dream protecting and take a little time to note the 5 Dream Zapper comments you most fear and expect to hear in 2010 about your business or lifestyle dream. Then write the antidote comment– the amazing quip that shows you for the really brilliant soul you are, and the one who is actually committed to achieving their heart’s desire and to doing it without trampling all over anyone else.

Now you have your ‘dream protection’ strategy in place, go slay em in 2010!

Image: Flickr Robert Couse-Baker

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The theatre placed a fair amount of advertising with the local newspaper, including a weekly calendar of events that chewed up quite a few column centimetres, plus display advertising for all the current and coming events. Quite often touring productions would have their own display advertising artwork pre-prepared, all we need to do was strip in our venue name and contacts. And just for the old hands, the artwork arrived as bromides (does anyone still use these?), bear in mind this was the early 1990s so we handled very little electronic artwork, although I seem to recall the newspaper starting to accept PDF artwork by email about that time.

But often the bromides were the wrong column width, or too much of the information was incorrect, so we’d need to prepare our own artwork. Of course I could have outsourced to our contract designer but that all cost money and time, so usually we’d give it a go, literally cutting and pasting – no, really, not pressing CTRL-C, I mean cutting pictures out with a craft knife, printing up some text, then gluing it all down to a display advertisement template page.

Once we had a decent layout, my next step was always to test the advertisement in the newspaper. By which I mean I would open the daily newspaper to the page where I was planning to run the advert, and glue a photocopy in place, over the top of some other ad. I wanted to see how our ad would look, surrounded as it was by all the other ads, stories, images and so forth. Did the ad ‘pop’ off the page, did it attract attention, was it different to the other ads? Obviously different sections in the newspaper would elicit a different response – early news, sport, art and culture and so on, each had its own type of content, its own characteristics, so an advertisement that worked well on a sports page might not translate so well to a property page. Hence it was important to check the ad against the potential page content it would be competing with for attention. We wanted to see the context in which the advert would appear.

Joshua Bell, one of the world's finest classical musicians, made $32 busking on a $3.5m violin

In 2007 The Washington Post conducted a fascinating experiment. They arranged for Joshua Bell, possibly one of the finest classical musicians in the world, to busk in a train station in Washington for three quarters of an hour. Bell has played to standing ovations around the world, he’s young, handsome and compelling to watch on stage. Bell took a cab the three blocks from his hotel to the station, not because he’s lazy, but because it was necessary to protect his violin, a ‘Strad’ made in 1712 during what’s considered Antonio Stradivari’s golden period, and worth a rumoured $3.5 million.

The newspaper did some research with local music experts. They asked the music director of the National Symphony Orchestra what he thought would happen if one of the world’s greatest musicians played some of the most remarkable classicial music pieces on one of the world’s finest instruments in a subway. The MD responded that he thought:

“out of 1,000 people, my guess is there might be 35 or 40 who will recognize the quality for what it is. Maybe 75 to 100 will stop and spend some time listening.”

He also guessed Bell would make $150.

He was wrong.

Bell made $32. Almost nobody stopped at all. Many didn’t even notice. Watch the video and read the Post’s article, it’s instructive.

As a respected art curator said, when told the story,

“we shouldn’t be too ready to label the Metro passersby unsophisticated boobs. Context matters.”

The curator gave his own example, of taking a $5 million picture from Washington’s National Gallery, and hanging it in a restaurant with a price tag of $150. It would be completely out of place, and probably wouldn’t sell.

It’s like running into people in the wrong place. By which I mean, where your previously relationship or dealings with them did not include the surrounds in which you subsequently meet. For example, I’ve been writing this post on a flight from Australia to San Francisco. I’m on United, but flew Qantas up from Melbourne to Sydney to catch the United connection. Across the aisle from me on the Qantas flight was a man who started waving and smiling. Took my synapses several snaps before they started to connect, it was a great guy who I did some work with a few years ago. We gesticulated and discovered we were both heading for San Fran, albeit different flights. Or the other day, Fiona and I were walking into the shopping centre lift with our children when one of the women exiting smiled and said ‘hi’. She had to remind us she was one of the staff from our youngest child’s day care centre – we see her all the time there. But in a shopping mall lift she was out of place, our minds had none of the usual indicators in the surroundings, activity or time or day to prompt the fact we know the woman. Instead we felt mildly embarrassed.

When you create online content at the foremost of your mind must be the context in which the content will be published, for example, in what formats will the content be viewed? Web, mobile, e-book? What audience – young, old, local, foreign, expert, beginner?

Try an exercise:

Take one of your existing online articles, and re-write it for:

1. The free newspaper given out to commuters at rush hour. These giveaways are light weight, short form, hurridly produced each day, designed for quick easy bites of information.
2. A major broadsheet newspaper, like the Washington Post, where long form, investigative pieces are normal, and the audience often has time and intellectual grounding to digest complex concepts
3. A gossip website like PerezHilton.com or tmz.com

What style would you use? What forms of language, sentence structure and article length? Try printing the piece out and doing what we did all those years ago, and place it on the newspaper page. How does it fit the context of the published environment?

It’s oft been said that ‘content is king’. But actually ‘Context is king’.

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