When Doc Searls says he does blogging to roll snowballs down the hill I totally understand that.

When geeks attack me saying “he’s just a user and isn’t technical” I should take that as a compliment.

Damn straight I’m a user. And, I want better software. That’s why I praise developers who do cool stuff. I find that that brings better results than any other technique I’ve found so far.

Pay the developers with love. Roll a snowball down the hill.

Found any new software that you love? Praise it!

Here’s a hint to developers: if you treat users with disdain, maybe that’s being reflected in your software! I think that’s the point Dave Winer is trying to make when he’s talking about the language geeks use to describe users.

I’m guilty of saying what Dave is talking about, by the way. We need better personas to talk about different kinds of people who use computers.

By the way, Doc, I still read your blog every day and have done so for more than five years now. Thanks for being such an inspiration to me and sharing so much of your life with me.

At the Northern Voice conference I met Markus Frind, founder of Plentyoffish.com. He’s Google’s #1 Adsense user in Canada. His site is pulling in more than $10,000 per day from Google, he told me, and has millions of passionate users. Tens of millions of page views EVERY DAY. Whew!

What’s the secret to his success? Ugly design. I call it “anti-marketing design.”

Huh?

He says that sites that have ugly designs are well known to pull more revenue, be more sticky, build better brands, and generally be more fun to participate in, than sites with beautiful designs.

Ahh, yet another example of anti-marketing marketing.

He joins a good list. Google. Is it pretty? No. Craig’s List? Pretty? No. MySpace? Pretty? No.

He says he designed his site to be easy to use, fast to load, and uncluttered, but he didn’t pick pretty colors or fonts. He did, however, spend a lot of time learning how search engines indexed their contents.

Why does anti-marketing design work? Well, for one, big companies will never do a site that doesn’t look pretty. Why? Cause of the prevailing belief that great brands need to be beautiful. Look at what corporate branding experts study. Apple. Target. BMW. Everything those guys do is beautiful. Aesthetic. Crafted by committees of ad marketing department experts.

But, go deeper: we’re sick of committee-driven marketing. We don’t believe it. If we ever did. We’ve built a bulls**t filter that filters out well-designed things in a commercial context. We trust things more when they look like they were done for the love of it rather than the sheer commercial value of it. That’s why my Channel 9 videos work. What kind of company committee could come up with something like that? Let some goofy guy with a goofy laugh go around with a cheap camcorder, no lights, no makeup, no editing and record conversations? Fire the guy who came up with that!
Look at Plentyoffish again. It was designed and coded by one guy: Markus. Seriously. One guy did that and is making all that cash. No committees. No experts. Just a guy who wanted to learn to program and did.

Oh, and I love that he picked .NET to code his site. It’s all running in .NET 2.0 and you should hear the praises he has for .NET. I wish I could film him and put him on Channel 9. It’d end all the talk that Windows isn’t scalable, isn’t secure, and can’t keep up a highly trafficed site.

But, back to the anti-marketing design. I think I accidentally fell into this as well. My design is ugly. Anti-marketing. Why? Because I wanted to make it fast. I didn’t choose a pretty font because doing so would have added a little bit of weight to my CSS file. Does this matter? I think it does. I read a LOT of blogs on my cell phone and mine loads WAY faster than many blogs out there.

It’s amazing how few corporate types get that the quality and engineering thought behind your HTML matters more than whether your site is pretty or not.

Maybe MySpace is kicking blogging’s behind because most blogs are simply too pretty!

By the way, his anti-marketing message continues right to his about page.

If it’s ugly is authentic. Not corporate. It is good. No?

For the record, I loved the OQO I was sent. It’s sexy. Fast. Has a nice screen. Is a great executive computer. But, and it’s the only but I have about it, is that it’s $2,100. I’ll be honest. I couldn’t afford it on my current salary and lifestyle. And, if I could, it would be one of those six-months-of-thinking decisions for me. It would be at the expense of something else. Get a new TV, or get an OQO? Get a new car or get an OQO? Get a new full-size Tablet PC or get an OQO? I’ll be honest, I would pick something other than the OQO in all those matchups. Why? Sheer utility/ROI for my life.

Is the Origami going to be any different? We’ll see on Monday. Dennis Rice’s post is what caused me to write this post. He’s right. It’s not going to be a device for everyone. If I were an executive making $400,000 a year I’d buy the OQO or Motion in a heartbeat. At my salary level, though, I’ve gotta be far more discriminating about where I spend my own money.

Mobile Jones says that MySpace is beating blogs (er, Technorati).

She’s right. In terms of sheer numbers MySpace is beating blogs. Hands down. Not even a close contest.

But, yesterday I discovered there’s a lot more important things than just having traffic. If you want traffic, there’s lots of ways for you to get it.

I’m looking to hang out with people who love what they do. If that’s on MySpace, I’m all for it. If that’s on blogs, I’m all for it. If that’s in Second Life, I’m all for it.

My son has a MySpace, he tells me, but thinks they are lame. He’s 12 years old. Deal.

I didn’t realize just how much work publishing a book caused AFTER publishing the book. Shel and I have been on dozens of radio stations, most of which are during drive time on the East Coast which means waking up at 4 a.m.

And then there’s the interviews. Ahh, the interviews! I thought this was glamorous, but it’s hard work to say something new and interesting. Here’s the latest in One Degree. The neat thing about doing so many is that I can experience a variety of interviewing styles and see which ones I like. The ones I like I subscribe to to watch other interviewees on. Ken Schafer’s One Degree is one of those.

On Thursday, Eric Schwartzman interviewed Shel Israel and me for his podcast. Do you know who listens to Eric’s podcast? Some of the top CEOs in the valley. He was an interesting guy to talk with, both on and off of the microphone. In his past life he was a director of promotions for quite a few big Hollywood events. I liked his style and am listening to many of his other podcasts now. Good stuff.

I wish I had more time to listen to more podcasts. There’s so much good stuff out there.

I was just talking with Todd Cochrane, founder of Podcaster News and he was showing me around. Cool, more podcasts to listen to. His favorites are the ones on health (he was suprised by the traffic they received) and the Entertainment show. But, the reason we were talking is he was showing me his software that runs the network and he showed me how it’s easily reskinnable and usable for other podcast networks (he’s licensing the software). Smart guy! After all, when there’s a gold rush, who’ll make more money? The guy who tries to dig the gold out of the ground? Or the guy who sells the miner a shovel?

Oh, why do I like his network? No show is longer than six minutes.

Good morning! ASP.NET is getting some real adoption in the Web space, Tim O’Reilly notes, (and at Mix you’ll see a lot more). I’m hearing from companies all over the place that are betting their futures on ASP.NET. More on Memeorandum.

TDavid notices that my blog sometimes redirects to Wordpress.com. Yes, I notice that too.

Wordpress.com is in beta. It is a new service. It’s run by 21-year-old Matt Mullenweg and a band of others. I’m sure it’s going to have some rough patches. I note that Six Apart is going through a rough patch of its own and it is older and better funded than WordPress.

Yes, I’m a guinea pig. Lots of people want to know why I don’t go on my own server and do all that. My coworkers at Microsoft are even offering to give me server rack space and help me do a super dooper blog.

The thing is, I know that 99% of people who blog will do so on hosted services. Most people will not see the value in setting up their own server, or co-locating it. In fact, most businesses won’t do that. Look at the popularity of TypePad.

But, I am learning there are severe disadvantages to going with a hosted solution. It’ll be interesting to see if WordPress and TypePad overcome these disadvantages. If they do they’ll see robust businesses build up around them. If not, there’ll be companies like Blogmatrix, What Counts, or Telligent who’ll be happy to jump in and get you setup with your own blog server.

Maryam has some good blogging advice for Patrick, our new blogger in the family. She wrote me a nice little poem. I love that!

Interesting little debate going on the blogs this morning. Anil Dash wants Flickr to pay its users, particularly the ones who put the most popular content onto the service. Caterina, co-founder of Flickr, answers back, says more to life than money.

That sounds cool, but there certainly is a belief among mainstream big company publishers I’m listening to that “user generated content” (I HATE that term) is how they are going to build profitable businesses. Basically, they are looking at bloggers and photographers and others as cheap labor. Get the stuff for free, stick ads next to it, and make a ton of money. That basically explains a large percentage of the Silicon Valley startup’s business plans lately too.

I feel the same about these folks as I felt about the folks who talked about “making sites sticky” in the late 1990s. They created business opportunity by being selfish and greedy. Which is sorta funny, when you think about it, isn’t it?

The real way to create a sticky site turned out to be to send people away from your site more often than anyone else.

It’ll be interesting to see if the best way to build a really great Internet business and a great Web-based community just might be to pay people to write, take photos, record podcasts, and give their knowledge into the system. Hmmm, what are the two of the hottest companies? eBay and Google. They pay their users, particularly ones who are popular (I have friends making $10,000+ a month off of Google ads, for instance).

I wonder what Dave Winer will say about this (I love his OPML tool). But, Scott Isaacs has what he calls: The Ultimate Outliner (almost).

Don’t know who Scott is? He was one of the inventors of DHTML and is one of our most talented developers (his code runs underneath Start.com, the new Hotmail coming out next year, and MSN Spaces).

I’m giving a talk tomorrow about corporate blogging. Thomas Hawk’s post caught my eye today where he praised the Media Center team for interacting with their customers and having conversations. That’s it. We’ve punched holes through all the intermediaries and now anyone can talk with the Media Center team about what they are doing. Think they suck? Now you have a place to say so. Of course, if you wanna know more, it’s a great place to ask questions too.

If you don’t watch tech.memeorandum.com today would be a good time to start. Blogs are talking about Google and Microsoft today. Every five minutes Memeorandum changes and brings new conversations in.

I told folks at the geek dinner on Monday that I found I was getting pulled into Memeorandum too much. It leads to circular thinking if all you do is link to stuff that’s already on Memeorandum. So, that’s why I’m not linking to either of the hot items today (Google is testing classifieds and MSN announced book search, among other things). Instead I’m trying to find new perspectives that aren’t yet discussed on Memeorandum. That’s how I’ll add value to the world.

It goes no further than what’s on their home page today: http://www.apple.com/

Kudos Apple!

And, thank you to Rosa Parks who taught us a better way to live.

Can one person change the world? Rosa taught us that one can. She’s my hero.

The Xbox folks just rebooted their system. Larry Hryb (Major Nelson) has the Xbox.com details.

C-Jump is a computer programming board game that helps kids learn programming languages such as C, C++, and Java. Looks interesting. Wonder if I could get my son to play it.

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