Innovation in Software

It’s now become a little bit more common knowledge that Vagueware is growing. Quickly. That has come as a bit of a surprise, but I’m embracing it fully as I see the opportunity to grow a great company and do some amazing things over the years to come. And I know I can’t do it alone.

The reality is that by 2Q2010 I might need a staff roster into the double digits. Given that the Vagueware Christmas party has to date consisted of me having a quiet drink on my own for the last three years, this is a big shift.

So, what gives? I’ve always been open about business development, even when I’ve later changed my mind, and I think some of you reading this will be impacted by the changes I’m seeing in the industry and thought I’d share. There’s more than enough to go around.

First, some background:

How the Manchester web development industry has worked so far

Manchester has until the last year or so basically been defined as a services-orientated new-media provider. What that means is that if you are a high street chain or building a brand you will go to the “boutiques” across the Northern Quarter, look at portfolios and appoint one of them to develop a website. Client choices are generally driven by a mixture of aesthetic, price and experience.

Then the agency will realise that there is some hard programming going on under the bonnet somewhere and will either have programmers in-house to handle it, or they might out-source it to a friendly coder who can help them out.

This means that a £50,000-£100,000 new media build might result in about £5,000-£10,000 of development work being commissioned.

The other part of the industry is the “pure code” sector. That’s where Vagueware has traditionally been – rich, highly interactive logic-focused applications that need design laying over it. Sometimes Vagueware has just overseen development to make sure the developers aren’t pulling anything over the eyes of the client. This generally results in about a 50/50 split between code and “media” work, but there has not been much of it around in the past and often some of us team up to work together.

This has worked very well until recently, and has produced some amazing output. High street brands send their work to Manchester, and the richness of the design community here is massively under-rated. The Big Chip Awards do something to offset that, but it causes a few issues:

• Developers are stuck at the bottom of the food chain causing growth and sustainability issues
• We struggle to build product-based companies in the city meaning the national media get sniffy with our efforts
• Those of us who aren’t designers are off the radar for funding streams and more positive media promotion

However, this is not going to be the case for ever more:

How the Manchester scene is changing

Quite simply, developers are getting more important. Part of this is down to people wanting to be more sophisticated about what they want to achieve. It’s no longer good enough to have a website with some ActionScript doing something funky-looking in Flash. Clients are seeking clones of YouTube or Facebook, iPhone applications, rich complicated services that need to sit on cloud infrastructures.

In short: they need propeller heads to make their dreams come true.

That means instead of being approached by an agency to take on a slice of a pie, developers are starting to get commissioned work directly and then seeking designers to take a slice of the pie.

It clicked for me a few weeks ago when I realised that the projects on the book at the moment were turning Vagueware into an agency, but not one dominated by new media but by big, complicated infrastructure requirements. Deep “Information Architecture” planning, behaviour-driven development with bags of specs, deploying onto clouds because clients want to scale to millions of users when they get traction, and so on. You get the idea.

“Oh, and can you find somebody to make it look nice?”. Sure we can!

I’m not saying this is the death of the traditional new media agency, but there *is* something going on here. People are using complex web and iPhone applications more often and are being inspired to commission their own ideas. Experience of off-shoring has meant fewer are likely to take it out to the cheapest bid – they want a great partner they trust and can discuss ideas with over a coffee.

By going to a “software development agency” as I am now referring to them, they not only get a quicker time to market but often they pay less too: Vagueware’s current rate can be doubled when handled via a middle man, and when you’re talking about a 40-day build plan, that adds up.

Designers are critical, and I can’t wait to work with more of them: some guys out there leave me astounded and wishing I had a more visually creative mind. However, I think their grip on the power base of this industry is slipping a little as more people want to build functional products.

And that means change. And wherever there is change, there is opportunity, which leads me onto:

How Vagueware is changing

Vagueware is going to ultimately have two revenue streams: products and services. Simple.

Products the things like Conveyor Belt (more on that next week), Kagtum and a few other tricks up various (rolled-up) sleeves at Vagueware HQ. We don’t expect these to monetise quickly, but they give us skin in the game in a couple of key areas that help us understand how parts of the industry work in a way just being a service provider can’t.

Services are what Vagueware does right now, but as a software development agency. Got a cool idea but have no idea how to implement it or even if it’s possible? You could go to a traditional new media agency but they might just call us. You could go to a design agency like Ideo but they might call us too. You know what you could do? Just call us. We’ll help make it happen and if it needs strong design, we’ll handle that and make it all dance beautifully in front of your very eyes.

Then there is the additional stuff I’m looking at developing over time: training, research and analysis, reports and other things I can’t talk about right now.

There is one other difference about what comes next too: we’re not limiting ourselves to the local market. In the next two months we’re going to be hitting London quite hard and by the year end I expect to be getting clients onto the books from North America (I’ve traditionally always had one or two in the US but will be growing that), and hopefully – albeit rather scarily – continental Europe.

In other words, I’m going for it. It’s scary, but the opportunity is ripe and the skills are available. The only reason I’ve not done this before is because it was hard to get commissions for rich, complex bespoke web app development. No longer.

Of course, I might have got it all wrong and it could all blow up in my face, but you never know until you try and there is always the ability to adapt if further down the line it becomes clear a bad decision has been made.

It seems I’m not the only person slightly bemused by the reaction to Steve Jobs’ revelation he had a liver transplant.

Other people’s reactions include:

• He owes me more work because I’m a fan of his work
• My share portfolio is at risk because of this
• I want more shiny plastic things from Apple. This worries me they won’t be as shiny.
• He didn’t tell us something personal that we deserve to know

My reaction:

• You just had a fricking liver transplant? Wow, get well soon and don’t listen to those guys baying for your attention, you need rest, ‘k?

This isn’t about shares or gadgets or what he owes you. It’s about somebody who is seriously ill taking some time out to make sure they can live a little longer. You know “life”, that thing you take for granted? The thing that isn’t really about accumulating possessions but being able to breathe, eat, love, dream? The mob doesn’t get that – perhaps because it isn’t available to download in the App Store or listed on the Nasdaq…

And yet, somehow, this reaction is predictable. Much in the same way that sexism is alive and well in the industry, selfishness – in particular consumerist self-absorption – is rife. We are the pinnacle of consumerism. We thrive on early adopters, so we grow them. And what we grow, we reap – this is another problem we need to think about.

As a collective the consumers seem no longer to see the humanity behind technology, choosing instead to become voyeuristic onanists viewing technology almost in the form of a fetish they are addicted to. In fact, porn is a good metaphor for where we are right now: dehumanise and objectify humanity to serve a selfish need. It doesn’t matter if the lens the fetish is viewed through is that of a camera or the blogosphere, providing it’s possible to sit at screens satisfying our cravings in private.

Maybe that’s just the Catholic in me talking. The Agnostic in me thinks we can do better too, though.

Some will argue this is just the fruit of modern capitalism. All advertising in a capitalist free-market society relies on a principle of false idolatry, designed to invoke a sense of inferiority in our subconsciousness. Apple does it better than anybody else on Earth, taking their marketing cues from designer label brands.

I think we might have gone a step too far. We might need to dial it back a notch or three and re-imagine what we’re here to do. There is something pure about what we do that is beyond the gadget and the price tag, the plastic or the electronics. As Dijkstra said (and is quoted as saying on my business cards): Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.

Yet here we are complaining about the telescope manufacturer needing a liver transplant because all we want is more telescopes. Good. Grief.

We should be grateful for the genius behind every design decision that comes out of our great technology companies, and they should rightly be rewarded with praise – they advance society one little increment at a time. But when somebody takes time out to have a life-saving operation, there is something distasteful about a swarm of self-interested parties demanding to know where their share of the grief is going to come from.

I don’t know the answer, I don’t have the solution. All I know is that I don’t want to be part of the problem.

P.S. writing this story I was reminded of the most human thing I ever read by Jobs’: his commencement speech at Stanford in 2005 which I highly recommend taking the time to read.

Vagueware sometimes does all the delivery of a project when doing service provision, sometimes it partners up, and sometimes we get asked just to keep an eye on things from afar.

More recently however we’ve been asked several times to sit down, talk through an idea, codify it into a loose specification and manage putting it out to tender for any firms interested in working on the project. This allows us to do what we do well, and others to get access to interesting and profitable projects.

We have recently been engaged by a client to produce a video portal site, the main selling point of which is the business execution behind it. We can’t go into explicit details on that front, but if you’re interested in looking at a sub-£10,000 build for a relatively simple video-to-mobile solution, we’d ask you to consider taking a look at the invitation to tender below.

Click here for invitation to tender

Please send all proposals back to me at paul AT vagueware DOT com by Tuesday the 30th June. Any further queries or questions should be directed via that address too.

I have pretty standard business cards when you first look at them. The company logo, my name (no job title – such things are no-nos even for a one-man business when your head is built like mine), phone number, address, email, yadda, yadda.

The address is changing soon and so I’m about to commission some new ones from my favourite printer, and that leads me to the feature few people ever notice about them: the reverse.

The back of my business card is where I do a little of my “philosophy thing”. One person saw it and immediately thought I was a prat. Another spent 10 minutes thinking about the phrases there and came back asking me questions. Most people don’t see them. Either way, it represents a lot of me and my original hopes for the company. Some of them work a couple of years on, some don’t. So, as part of the change, this will get a revamp.

I’ve decided to make the current version available as high-res desktop images, one dark and one light. The slightly strange dimensions are due to the fact they are derived from the original 300dpi business card design used to create my actual cards.

I also appreciate that some will point out that DHH is not the first person to come out with the “best way to predict the future” quote or at the least his version is a derivative, but I like it, and DHH’s work has obviously been important to my business being a RoR shop and all that.

Enjoy, read, query, do with them as you like. I had the dark one as my laptop’s desktop wallpaper for quite a while now (hence the reason it doesn’t have a “version number” on it).

Suggestions as to what to put on the back of v2.0 are welcome via email.

Light (click for full size):

Dark (click for full size):

P.S. The French at the bottom translates roughly as: The future is not what is coming towards us, but what we are heading towards

Vagueware Ltd is just over 3 years old. In all that time, there has only ever been one full-time employee – myself. I’ve sub-contracted work occasionally before but I’ve resisted hiring because the amount of work I’ve been doing has been enough that I’ve not been able to invest as much time needed in sales to secure somebody else’s salary.

That now needs to change, as the amount of work is growing and the number of products due for launch is increasing. Revenues for the next six months will exceed the total for the previous three years combined, and it’s all getting very busy.

Before I go on please do not contact me if you are a recruitment consultant, because whilst I know you’re different from all the rest and I really should give you a chance, I really am not prepared to work with any agency or recruitment consultant. I want direct approaches from talented individuals only. Sorry, and good luck with your continuing search for employers.

Now, with that out of the way…

Who am I hiring? For what positions? And how much am I paying?

Well, quite simply: you tell me.

This might seem like a joke. It isn’t. I am deadly serious in my approach, and the fact that somebody is prepared to respond to this kind of a call for CVs shows they have jumped over a mental hurdle that makes them a good fit from day one. I’ve wanted to do this for years.

The Philosophy

Around eight years ago I read the story of Ricardo Semler and knew immediately that was how I wanted to run my business. It works like this:

• Everybody in the company can see the accounts at any time they want
• They can ask for any salary they want
• They mostly – with management guidance – dictate their own job role
• Rather than managers hiring staff, staff hire their managers
• Everybody in the company given the above information (including other people’s salaries), police themselves into making a good company a great one

Mix into that the principles of W.L. Gore & Associates where everybody has the same job title and the structure grows into a lattice, I think you can see where I want Vagueware to be five years from now:

• Completely flat in terms of management structure (UK law requires there to be a director, and I’m currently sole shareholder, but we can think through a way out this if what I propose begins to work)
• A meritocracy where the quality of your work is what counts
• Staff choosing their own hours
• Staff choosing their own salary
• Staff choosing their own input into each project
• Everybody is accountable to everybody else in the company, not to a boss who doesn’t understand what you do (even if in the early years I have to pretend I do).

Yes, it’s a little radical. However, I wouldn’t want it any other way. When I talk about R&D I want it to mean “Radical & Daring” as much as it does “Research & Development”

What can Vagueware offer you?

Vagueware has for the last three years focused on developing bespoke software solutions for a range of clients including government departments, charities, trendy companies staffed by guys too cool to go to school, and beyond. The Vagueware Blog (you’re reading it right now), gets thousands of readers a week and is about to be restructured to engage with multiple audiences in a deeper and much more meaningful way within the software R&D communities. I personally am known across the region and within the industry as an opinionated and engaging thinker who works so hard, he never seems to get anything done (except behind the scenes, beautiful things happen daily).

Vagueware has delivered a range of services in the past: Ruby on Rails development; infrastructure planning and deployment; training; analysis, reporting and management reviews; quality assurance assessments of development projects; project management; technical writing, columns for papers and trade magazines; and on one occasion Vagueware was retained by a client to “argue” with their ideas. That was fun.

In the next year projects are likely to include overseeing delivery of an amazing tool for training, a logistics application for a trendy niche sector and oversight & assistance on a project that has major influence in central and local government departments.

Other client projects that are further away on the sales pipeline involve big information architecture issues, research & development using some of the coolest technology around, and migration of many projects to cloud services and the building of tools and services to give clients the best combination of flexibility and scalability in the sector.

In addition, we’re looking to launch Kagtum and a set of associated tools around some collaborative intelligence algorithms, a new project management tool that makes life easier for everybody involved in producing outputs, and in the long run a whole boatload of projects including many ideas coming from our peers, colleagues and clients.

It’s also planned that work concerning industry analysis, training and research will increase dramatically.

Over the next 9 months the company will need to re-invent itself in a few areas to fit around a changing economy and marketplace, and there’s a good chance there will never really be a true “head office” unless you want to build it yourself: if you want to work in a provided office, great. Otherwise work where you like.

In addition to choosing your own salary, work location, job role and hours, Vagueware will provide an annual equipment budget to furnish yourself with work equipment of your choosing. We won’t go out and buy you an Apple laptop and sit you in an Aeron chair against your will just because it sounds “cool”, but we’ll allow you to buy them yourself on our account if that’s what you feel you need to do your job.

You can find out more about some of the things the company does from the laughably-in-need-of-an-update-and-redesign-and-restructure website

What do we want from you?

Vagueware is looking for people who think they have something to offer to come and spell it out.

Skills I’m personally interested in hearing about include:

• PR, marketing and sales people who understand relationships and why Vagueware is a little bit different
• Developers – we’re currently 100% RoR, but all languages and frameworks considered
• Designers with lickable portfolios
• Project Managers/Account Managers who can beat the drum in such a way people dance whilst they work
• Analysts/researchers/writers who are interested in people, technology and the industry because it’s interesting not just because it’s profitable
• Technology Philosophers. No, really, thinking is important to what the company does.

Ideally you should be interested in doing something in more than one of these areas, simply because silos can’t really exist in this marketplace any more and people who like to be pushed into new skills are ideal fits for the culture Vagueware hopes to grow.

Ultimately, you should love technology, society, their collective potential and spend your time dreaming of what your place in the industry could be a few years from now, and be prepared to act to get there.

You should be committed to the company goals I’ve spelled out above and work actively towards a flat management structure, with open accounting standards and the ability o work without keeping your salary a closely-guarded secret.

You can be located anywhere on the planet, but there is an advantage if you’re based in the EU and entitled to work in the EU. If you’re not entitled to work in the EU but want to work here, sorry but no dice for now: reconsider whether you could work where you are. If you want to work whilst you travel, that’s fine, just explain how it’ll work.

To apply, send me an e-mail to paul AT vagueware dot com with the following:

• A one-page CV
• Some links to work you’ve done if applicable
• A short covering letter explaining:
  • what you want to do for Vagueware
  • how much you want to be paid for your talents (we are not looking for cheap labour, be realistic about what gives you a comfortable lifestyle!)
  • the location you want to work from and if you need an office providing
  • the hours you want to work
  • and how hiring you is the best thing I can do for you – I’ll work out for myself if it’s the best thing for Vagueware, I’m interested in your side of the story right now.

Right now, don’t go overboard on this. Go with your first draft – I want to see you writing from your gut – and the CV you have drafted to hand (you always have a CV to hand, right?).

It may be that right now, as in today, I can’t take advantage of the skills you have and I need to put your application on file (I’ll tell you when I do), but if you’re good enough you will get a call the moment I can work out how to meet your salary demands. For now then, keep it simple and if you pique my interest I’ll get back to you and ask you some more questions.

All applications will be kept in confidence, and whilst it shouldn’t need spelling out: we’re an equal opportunities employer and do not discriminate against gender, sexuality, age, ethnicity or religion.

This might all seem a very strange, hippy-esque thing to do. In some ways it is. It’s an experiment and I’m keen to hear from the people get in touch. If it doesn’t work, I’ll be very disappointed, but I’ll keep trying.

I look forward to hearing from you, and thank you for you interest in considering Vagueware as the company where you get to do your thing.

Paul Robinson

I know we’ve been here before, and in some cases it’s been more directly offensive but it seems that some guys are still idiots when it comes to dealing with women in technology with a modicum of respect.

Hoss Gifford’s recent presentation at Flashbelt caused many in the audience to feel more than a little offended. From the mail Courtney Remes sent published at the above link, his presentation was not exactly family-friendly. For those of you who want a slightly cleaner version of what happened than the version Courtney described, it involved:

• Photos of women in high heels with legs spread, genitals visible through see-through underwear and Hoss’ face photoshopped on underneath, captioned “Drink Me” at both the start and end of the presentation
• An invitation to a woman in the audience to draw something on-screen which he remarked looked like male genitals
• Several drawings of his own of male genitals in a childish manner showing semen covering a face
• Lots and lots of swearing, lots of references to genitalia
• The phrase “if you are easily offended, then f[…] you”
• An animated movie of a woman’s face that is positioned as if she’s having sex with the viewer that gets closer to orgasm the quicker you move your mouse.

Many in the audience apparently laughed at this. If that’s what the Flash community is like these days, frankly, I’m going to steer clients away from Flash so we don’t have to deal with such juvenile behaviour whilst doing our work.

Some in the “community” (which frankly doesn’t exist as such if this is their collective attitude), suggest that feeling offended at such a presentation at a professional conference marks you out as being prudish or “too politically correct”. What? Politically correct? Since when has it been acceptable at any professional conference where people are expecting professional material, to be this crass and obscene?

It seems the conference organiser has unreservedly apologised, but that’s not the issue: it shouldn’t have happened in the first place, and the fact it did is only partly his fault.

There is no other industry on the planet (with the notable exception of the porn industry), where this behaviour and attitude would even be remotely tolerated. Collectively we are going to have to deal with this, and sooner rather than later.

We all have the capacity to make off-colour humour sometimes, but not in a professional context in front of an audience of industry professionals paying good money to hear your keynote. What jokes you tell down the pub are between you and your drinking buddies, but when you are going out of your way to offend and disenfranchise a whole section of your professional community because you have the “professional” mind of a 15-year old, you need to reassess what the hell you’re playing at.

We need more diversity in this sector for it to thrive and this attitude is just going to make fewer women interested in being involved in future. Quite frankly, I don’t blame them. If we can’t act as grown-ups, treat women as equals deserving of professional respect and at least hold back from the knob jokes when we’re delivering a keynote presentation at a conference they paid $399 to attend, we don’t deserve their skills and the industry almost deserves to whither and die.

Many in the industry aren’t remotely like Hoss. Those of us who feel we need to act as professionals need to start standing our ground and talking about these issues more. We are not prudes, we’re not being “politically correct”, we’re just trying to build an inclusive and professional industry everybody can be proud of.

That all said, some of the feedback on Twitter has gone beyond the pale. Yes, it’s offensive and we need to constructively address the issues, but is this really called for?

• gabbyhon: If you waterboard this Hoss Gifford asshole, he sure as hell will never pull that vile crap again. I’m just sayin’.
• kwatson49: I heard the birth of Hoss Gifford was the reason that birth control was invented. Interesting.

This isn’t constructive in the slightest. It doesn’t help the situation one jot, and it doesn’t make the people who think this behaviour is acceptable reassess their attitude – it just makes them more keen to defend the indefensible. I suggest we concentrate on finding something more positive and constructive to take away from it.

We are a powerful and influential industry – it’s time to behave like adults and treat everybody with some respect. Here’s hoping this is all another educational experience for the whole sector.

I have been throwing a mantra around at clients in the last year:

Only 20% of software development is about writing code. The other 80% is all about communication

As an industry, we are awful at communication. I don’t mean writing reports, I mean listening. Really listening.

Guess what? The clients have noticed. I’m spending more time picking up pieces after people didn’t listen. Sometimes I look at work I’ve done myself and realise I didn’t do it so well myself. Live and learn…

This last week I was reminded of an old article I wrote here that discussed the rudeness and arrogance of some developers. A client suggest we “resume this phone call when you’re less frustrated with me”, and when I apologised and explained my frustration he simply answered “that’s fine, but I’ve had the same thing for years from my ex-wife”.

Wow.

When I realise I’ve dropped the ball, I’ve upset somebody and I’ve not known how I did it, I step back and re-evaluate myself. It would have been easy to blame the client, it would have been less challenging to just write it off as one of those things. But that doesn’t help him, and therefore I’m failing.

Stories I hear at events tell me I’m one of the few guys who will go through that process – the majority just write off the client as being at fault, and we all end up with a bad reputation.

I’m worried for the next few years this problem is going to get worse across the industry. We have more clued up people in the industry than ever before, and we are building more and more echo chambers where you hear people at events talking about Twitter as if it were as common place in people’s lives as a fridge.

Over the next few years we are going to see an influx of creators, innovators and entrepreneurs with great ideas who don’t know much (yet) about software development. I just sat down with one potential client and explained Behaviour-Driven Development at an abstract level and they were blown away by the sophistication of the philosophy. I then realised that to me this is every-day stuff, to them it’s not a million miles away from arcane magic.

We need to do a better job at explaining development to people who don’t know anything about it. We need to explain why it’s worth spending money on doing less, but that less is of a higher quality. We need to stop and listen to what they need to help build a great business. And that is key: ultimately, we are not providing a service or building a product – we are helping them build a great business.

And the only way for most of us to help them do that, is to produce great software.

And in turn, the only way to do that is to get better at the other 80% of the job we’ve been so used to ignoring until now: communication.

I expect I’m going to be talking about this a lot more over the next few years.

When you first watch this, you think it’s some guy being videoed by people laughing at him for not dancing very well. Then another guy joins in and it’s two guys who are clearly drunk and probably on something. Then the third guy gets involved… and within a minute you start to laugh…

By the end I am asking myself the same question as the girl whose voice you hear asking “How did he do that?”. He understands his audience and gave them what they wanted right there and then, that’s all.

(via Seth whose blog should be in your RSS reader if it isn’t already).

One of my clients has hinted he wants me to talk about blogging to his team.

This surprised me.

Sure, I’ve blogged for years. Right now I have publish rights to about half a dozen blogs, the majority not created by me. I’ve got into some great events courtesy of my writing for MEN, won clients because of this blog, thousands of people read my words every month and I love writing and I want to continue doing it for the rest of my life.

However, I’m a developer, entrepreneur, analyst, systems administrator, systems architect, training guy and occasional blogger. I’m not one of the new breed of social media consultants who spend their days analysing how to grow blog and twitter audiences.

Can I tell anybody else how to blog? I’ve been thinking about where I’d start if I suddenly decided I was going to be a SMC, and came up with some questions I’d ask a client who wants to try and get into blogging.

1. What are your favourite blogs? If you don’t have any, that’s because you’re not reading any blogs. If you’re not reading material in the genre you’re writing for, you can’t understand how to write for it. It is evident that many bloggers do not read blogs just by reading the awful material they pour out..

   In a past life as an occasional freelance writer I had gigs writing speeches, editorials, in-flight magazine articles, essays, short stories and – yes, they really are made up by a staff writer in some cases – “Readers letters” for a top-shelf magazine. I have written novels for NaNoWriMo, attempted a screen play and I intend to write more just for the joy of writing in those genres. I researched each genre (the top-shelf research frankly left me disturbed), before I started writing for them. If I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have known what I was doing and the finished result would have been inadequate..

   If you aren’t up to speed, go and get a Google Reader account, learn about RSS and read some blogs in the area you’re writing for as well as blogs that interest you personally. Learn the styles, what works, what doesn’t, and ask around for other people’s favourites. An RSS reader like Google’s may allow you to skim through 30+ blogs a day in less than 10 minutes. If it takes too long, mark all as read and try again tomorrow.

2. What’s the style you’re aiming for? Do you need to remain formal and distant, or are you going to be more personable and “chatty”? It’s possible to be chatty *and* professional (I hope this blog proves that), but many new blogs seem to go too far into the extremes: they become stilted, boring diatribes in the style of press releases, or you discover an intellectual property lawyer going on about his cat three times a day. Both are wrong, and will fail quickly for good reason.

3. Do you actually care about what you’re writing about? If not, change it. You may need to write something in a particular area because your boss told you to, and you’d rather write about chocolate or your favourite football team, but you have to find the bit that excites you. If you can’t find something in there that excites you, maybe it’s time to consider whether you’re working for the right boss..

   It is nearly always possible however to find something that sings to you individually as well as is of appeal to the audience you’re aiming for – it’s only when you find that angle that the writing will flow and it’ll be enjoyable.

4. Who is your audience? This is critical. You need to think about your audience, why they should be interested in you, and how to make the most of their time. In the new information economy if somebody gives you their attention it should be considered a gift, so don’t waste it. Think about their needs, wants and expectations then try and work out how to meet them. In fact, no, exceed them..

   Interestingly, the audiences I’ve chased never arrived, and the audiences I have are people who just find something about me and my thoughts I didn’t know was there myself. That might be my bad execution, it could be a general lesson to learn. However not aiming at all is just going to result in a shambles.

5. Do you know what the basic blog article templates are? All writing is based on a template of some sort: boy meets girl movie scripts; best man’s speeches that leave the room laughing; murder mysteries littered with red herrings; etc. Blogging is no different..

   Here are some basic ones to get you going linked to articles I’ve written in template: response to news item or report; top tips for something (like this post); announcement of new product or service even if it’s quite small; link to article you liked with editorial (see below); rants dressed as analysis – even angry rants – seeking reaction or change; live-blogging of an event or conference.

   Mix up that lot within a niche, and you’re going to start building a brand.

6. You know it’s a conversation, right? I’m a hypocrite on this one as I link lightly, but blogging is a conversation. You link to articles you like by other bloggers, and they might link back to you. If your audiences are related, you both win. The link is like currency in the blogosphere as it greases the wheels of growing an audience.

   Some people have comments on their blogs. I do on some of mine. On this one, I don’t [edit: I now do] - that needs to change soon, but the Vagueware blog section is about to undergo a major re-jigging so it’ll wait until then. The conversation though is how you go from broadcast to social. If you’re not linking, you’re not commenting on other people’s blogs and you’re not open to people linking and commenting on your material, you’re not getting it. You’re just doing press releases in Wordpress.

7. Can you actually write? I don’t mean can you hold a pen, I mean can you hold an audience? Some can, some can’t..

   If you struggle to let writing flow, read more and think about what you’re reading. Roll nice sentences around in your head and think about how they work. Style guides might help, but only if you’re a robot. Read, read, read…

8. There are no forumlas, so why are you sticking to them? Everything I’ve just said could be wrong. It probably is. You need to experiment and listen to your own audience. I was on the panel at Speak To A Geek and when one audience member pointed out few in her target audience had access to a computer, I suggested she print things out and hands it to them – the blogosphere is not Neverland where all your communications problems are solved. Think. Act. Enjoy. See what happens.

I hope that helps somebody, somewhere. Writing it has helped me re-think a few things. And now I’ll see what I can do for that client…

Friend of Vagueware, Manoj Ranaweera has recently announced his web 2.0 play edocr.com has launched some new services for companies wanting to create a public repository of all their documents.

It’s no secret that many in the local tech scene have marvelled at Manoj’s persistence and enthusiasm for edocr, but for a while some have been waiting for him to carve out his own unique niche, and I think this is a big part of it.

Yes, there are other document sharing sites out there, but how many of them are so focused on business and business research? There are lots of clever widgets on the other sites, but how many of them allow a company to start producing their own document channels easily like Howarth Clark Whitehill, allowing anybody in the organisation to upload a file and have it converted into a web-friendly Flash document? Yes, you could produce your own repository, but is it findable? Where is the serendipity? Isn’t it easier to outsource it all to the brains behind the scenes at edocr?

I’m starting to get what he goes on about now, and think if he keeps this up he’s on to a winner. Manoj’s twitter stream suggests a tweak to the design of the site and a move to EC2 is on the cards – I think if/when those things happen, there’s nothing stopping him building this into a major web industry player.