Solomon Giles Design

My blog is rather spastic. It’s a business blog, a tech blog, an apple fanboy blog, a thoughts on life, an ROI blog, a marketing and SEO blog, a design blog, a … ok you get the picture.

It would seem on the surface that I am flying in the face of the current rhetoric. Over and over again, you hear top bloggers and thinkers in the online community saying that, in todays super-saturated blogosphere, the most effective way to get heard is to pick a niche.

It’s not bad advise if that’s you thing. If there’s a niche you fit into then own it and be the best at it. Become the number one authority on Czech Butterfly collecting and make your site a hub for all things Czech Butterfly.

The problem is, that tactic just doesn’t work for everyone. I’m not a niche-y fellow. I’m all over the place.

If I chose a niche, I’d lose interest and then so would you.

Pretty soon my blogging would get tired and inauthentic. In fact, coming from me niche topic blogging would be the very definition of inauthentic. Alas. What are we to do? So many of us poor ADD-riddled children of the future are not likely to make great niche topic bloggers.

Or are we?

Here’s the catch: there’s nothing that’s more of a niche than you. My all-over-the-place blog, this epitome of General, does in fact appeal to the most specific set of interests imaginable. This blog appeals to my interests. I’m blogging for me. And there’s nothing more authentic or specific than that.

Sure, there’s the risk that my specific interest soup is too specific a melange to appeal to others. But, I doubt it. I think our repective Venn diagrams of interest overlap enough that there’s a gazillion people out there who are into some 2/3 of what I write about.

At the end of the day, that 2/3′s is about the same ratio of stuff I’m interested in any blog, regardless of niche size. I say, write about what interests you, it’s going to interest some and not others regardless of how you position yourself.

Sure, it might be easier in the short term to rank for niche topic keywords if that’s all you write about. But that only works if your heart is it. Ranking in search engines is all about links. And people, by and large, link to great content. Long run, the best and most sustainable way to create great content is to speak from the heart and to do what you love.

I just googled around for a way to share your external hard drives in Snow Leopard over a wireless home network and couldn’t find a straight answer. But, motivated by my girlfriend using my iPad until I could get to the bottom of things, I figured it out. Here’s what I did:

You need to be using either,

1. Airport Extreme,
2. Time Capsule,
3. a wireless LAN created using internet sharing via OS X (this is what I’ve got)

It’s really simple to set up:

1. Go into System Preferences and open up the Sharing Pane
2. Check the box next to the File Sharing service.
3. Click the + icon under Shared Folders.
4. In the Dialog that pops up, select the external Hard Drive that you want to share over your home network. (Or any folder you can see for that matter).

To access your newly shared Hard Drive over your home network:

1. Open Finder on your Mac of choice.
2. Open the Shared tab in the left column of Finder.
3. And, you’re off to the races! I’ve even been able to stream video without a problem and my HD is connect over USB.

Hope that helped. Feel free to email me with any questions.

Growing up, I can remember my mom often insisting that I give people the Benefit of the Doubt whenever possible. In fact, being a little trouble maker, I was often the beneficiary of this generous outlook. It’s not any easy thing to allow, to believe in the goodness of people when there are always a million reasons not to.

Stepping back.

Whenever I get a chance to put some distance between my initial, often more judgemental, reactions to someone’s actions I almost always find that I was being too harsh. It will turn out that they were not, in fact, being assholes; that maybe I had misread the situation. At least, I’ll often find, that I simply don’t have enough information to assume the worst.

Nowhere is Believing the Best more important than online.

On the interwebs, we lose many of the hints that we can use to inform our assumptions in the “real” world. Not that these off-line assumptions are any less informed by ego or emotions. It’s just that online we lose tone of voice, body language and facial expressions at least to some extent. I often find people are really rude online. My initial reaction, I’m embarrassed to say, is to tear those cheeky so-and-so’s a new one.

So, probably more for me than you, I’m just wanted to put this in words: people are essentially good and I’m going to assume the best. I’m going to give people the benefit of doubting that they are jerks. Until I know otherwise, I am going to read the words I find online with a tone befitting this view. And, most of all, I’m going to do myself the good service of letting people be innocent until proven guilty.

Do it for the children.

We’re a community. A real community, not just some abstract metaphor but a group of people working and living our lives together. The alternatives to assuming the best are not places I want to live in. I’m done road raging at my desk. So, next time we meet you’ll have a reason to assume the best too.

Just read a brilliant article by David over at 37Signals called You couldn’t Pay me to work for Balmer. While there’s no real question that Microsoft is losing serious ground, David did a great job of showing this was a long time coming, and potentially all Balmer’s fault.

David also made the point the Apple needs some competition. I think they’ve got it in spades and it’s called Google. While two companies’ core businesses started out looking very different, we are increasingly seeing them overlap.

Take Android vs the iPhone and Apple’s return shot, the introduction of iAd.

What interests me most about this competition is that they employ antithetical business & innovation models, i.e. mostly closed vs mostly open. These models both have huge benefits to the companies that employ them and to the consumers that use their products. They also both produce knowledge and innovation in different manners, which when competing so healthily are actually very complimentary.

What worries me most is Job’s health.

Very few dictators in history have been able to pass the torch along. And let’s be honest, a dictator is exactly what jobs is. Benevolent mostly, but a dictator nonetheless. The problem is, I really don’t see another Jobs in the ranks at Apple. And, as you’ve so eloquently shown this could be a rather large problem for the consumer in the coming decade.

So I was going to include a photo of Jack Nicholson in the shining to compliment my post title. But then I looked up a photo of Jack Nicholson in the Shining and decided to spare you the horror of it.

I’m back, but not like Jack.

I was away for a couple of weeks visiting family in Montreal. My Aunt was recently diagnosed with terminal cancer and so I was home spending some quality time with her and the rest. It was a really wonderful visit.

Anyhow, I wrote a couple of posts on my new iPad while I was there. But WordPress for iPad really sucks and so I was waiting till I got home to publish them. I was up in the air about this, but I decided to publish them under the date that they were written rather than the date they were posted.

I’m excited to get back to blogging and tweeting. I’d say that I’m looking forward to hearing from you but short of email, I really put a kibosh on that by turning off comments. I’ve since decided that this was a stupid idea and will be turning them back on, as soon as I get my blog transferred over to a new CMS.

Sitting in the Amsterdam airport, eating a rather tasty, all-organic, free range, yadda yadda sandwich. Even the box it came in is fully biodegradable.

My dilemma
I’m about two thirds done and I am full. I find myself facing a familiar issue. When eating away from home, do I eat more than I need & want or do I throw perfectly good food away? Which is more wasteful?

The option I wish I had
I wish “take away” was less often a one-use concept. I wish this box resealed. Nothing fancy required, just a way to be sure the contents of my sandwich wouldn’t end up strewn about my bag.

The bigger picture
Try to consider as much of a product’s life cycle as you can. Then get out there and use your product, talk to others who are doing the same, and make it easy for them to talk to you.

It’s amazing how a single feature can totally transform someone one’s life. About two years ago, I showed my Dad how to do screen captures on his Mac. He’s an old-school independent businessman and the ability to save, and archive or share, anything he sees on screen has totally transformed his ability to do business. Now

Recently, I was back in Montreal, where my Dad lives, and I discovered that he had over 90 unread messages his gmail inbox. The reason was not that he had inbox bloat but that he was forwarding himself his most important messages over and over again so as not to lose them.

The answer was simple.
I showed him that starred messages were never actually lost, I created a special folder for those 90 emails, and I introduced him to the gmail search feature. Of all the things I showed him, I’m confident that the search feature will be the transformative one.

When I showed him search, his Jaw hit the floor. Seeing that he could type in a keyword or two and find emails from years ago, or instantly amass all the correspondence shared with a given client changed my Dad’s life. Previously he would have to spend hours combing through years of emails to prepare for an important meeting. Now, he could do it in seconds.

Not noticing doesn’t equal not noteworthy.
For those of us so immersed in technology, it is easy to forget how miraculous it really is. But it does change our lives for good and bad all day every day. We need not to think too hard to come up with examples. Cellphones, Skype and email; the list goes on and we’re just talking recent junk. Language, wheels, paper and movable type are some of the classics. But I digress.

The point I want to make is how innocuous these life changing pieces of technology become. We must be weary of this fact as it is in these very forgotten details that the true power to change people’s lives exists.

“Good things come to those that wait,” had always meant to me, “be patient (maybe work hard) and you’ll get what you want in the end.” I’ve been waiting to get an iPad for what feels like a very long time. In fact I started setting aside my sheckles for it when it was nothing more than a whisper of a rumour. Now I am on my way back to North America, for unrelated reasons, and am going to pick one up this weekend.

Holy crap am I excited. It’s practically all I can think about. You either get that or you don’t. But regardless of whether you’re a whore for Apple products like yours truly, you know what it’s like to be filled with excited anticipation.

Maybe waiting is what you get for waiting. And maybe that’s a really good thing.

It’s not you. It’s me.

My comments are were on for all the wrong reasons. And claims of busyness or unmanageable quantities would be nothing more than ego-pandering and lies. Truth is, I just can’t handle switched-on comments without praying for popularity and it’s clouding my judgment.

I want to write for me and hope that you find it interesting too. I don’t have the energy to be both coy & strategic and then thoughtful & honest. So today, I’m giving Thoughtful and Honest a leg up.

I’ve recently started using the Hubspot inbound marketing software and it’s powerful stuff. So powerful in fact, you can expect an upcoming post about the ethical issues such in depth analytics bring in question.

Hubspot is Constantly Improving Their Product.

And that’s problematic. Their software supe-ups are released in a slow and steady flow, and they’re all incremental. On the surface this seems like a great business strategy. But the results are unfortunate.

First, the Hubspot software is vast and complicated. Less complicated, mind you, than it was a month ago, but it ain’t no toaster. To get most out of their software, which costs from $250 to $1500 a month, you really need to understand how to use the whole damn thing. This means users need accessible, clear and accurate support materials.

The problem is, these incremental improvements necessitate their support materials always being on step behind the software. And thing lag leads to sloppy content, typos & missing words, missing links, etc. All of this costs their customers time and often leaves me without the answers I need. With something so inherently complicated and vast, these issues grow the problem exponentially as the user has to work harder the more they use, to keep their learning organized and skills on task.

There second problem is that their army of staff (coaches, experts, support, sales, etc.) are also left behind on the latest features. I’m often waiting a week or more for answers to simple questions because the answers are always a moving target. This whole system erodes the customer’s faith in a company and builds frustration, always a dangerous road to embark on an a service provider.

The Solution? Design like Apple.

Take your time, design for a big release, trim the edges, release and repeat. Your users will thank you. Your staff will thank you.

And, the time you end up saving, not chasing your tail in this self-imposed game of catch-up, can now be devoted to releasing higher quality work that is supported by a cohesion of intent and design.