Hackers Crack Copy Protection CD's. Some music fans are trying to fake out CD copy protection technology with the stroke of a felt-tip pen. By The Associated Press. [New York Times: Technology]

``Consumers should be aware that attempting to circumvent copy control by writing or attaching anything to the disc can result in permanent damage to the disc, and possible damage to the playback device,'' Sony DADC said in a statement last week.

Where were all these people during the copy protection 'wars' from the early days of the PC market? Letting hypothetical concerns about a highly visible, but relatively small, segment of the market make you treat all of your legitimate market like criminals just pissses people off and does nothing to solve your hypothetical problem.

Of course, you can always get some consultant to give you a study confirming the end fo the free world (think Viant's claims that half a million illegal movie downloads happen every day). Viant does provide a link to its reports on "The Copyright Crusade ," which is commendable. On the other hand, the "report" provides no explanation of their data or of their methods for estimating. I wish my clients would have been so accepting of my conclusions without testing my thinking.

There are issues worth thinking about here. But I haven't seen much effort to create a fact base to work from or to lay out a logical argument that could be analyzed. I suppose if you've grown accustomed to Madison Avenue persuasion techniques, the notion of informed debate isn't likely to occur to you. 

10:42:05 PM •  • comment  

One of tomorrow's innovations. More links for Radio weblogs. It's going to point to the blogroll OPML, if it's present; and to mySubscriptions.opml, and a change in the format for the link to the RSS feed. We won't release the code until tomorrow, to provide a very brief comment period. This weblog already has the three types of links in its head. View source to see what they look like. [Dave's Handsome Radio Blog!]

Still haven't had time to figure out what all of this actually means, but I've implemented the changes in my template anyway. Sometimes, you've just got to believe 

9:34:43 AM •  • comment  

Activewords - And The Problem of User-Interface

Activewords  is a cool program that I have blogged about before, and even created a whole story post (see my link over on the right).  I've been running it for 263 days now (the program keeps track of this) and it has saved me 40 hours of time since then (it keeps track of that too).  Buzz and I talk constantly about why more people don't use ActiveWords, given its tremendous power.  He thinks about this a lot more than I do since he is one of the principals of the company, but I think about it a lot because I have tried to get people to use it and, while some of them take to it quickly and like it, there are many who don't.

Trying to figure out why more people don't use this product is useful to me not just to understand ActiveWords' marketing challenge, but to understand something greater.  I think that there is a lesson in here for all software developers and marketers.  I don't pretend to know what the lesson is, at least not completely.  But here are my preliminary thoughts.

[Ernie the Attorney]

Buzz will be joining us for tomorrow night's final class, so this is timely. Take a few minutes to read the rest of Ernie's remarks. Activewords is a tool that is both a knowledge work productivity tool in its own right and an excellent illustration of the challenges of applying technology to knowledge work in general.

We start with the slipperiness of defining productivity as it relates to knowledge work. We've hit on this topics several times; if our output is ideas rather than widgets, then getting at productivity is hard. One thing is clear to me; any effort to improve productivity as a knowledge worked is going to entail change in your work processes. Step one is becoming mindful of what your existing processes are. If you don't understand what you're doing now, how can you improve it?

Once you have an idea of how your baseline process works, then you have a choice of tackling either the input or output side of the productivity equation. Most technology tools address some aspect of the input. Activewords, for example, lets you target various forms of time-wasters and inefficiencies. While that can be helpful, there is a limit to how much improvement you can make on the input side. That effort needs to be balanced against the potential lock-in you create for yourself in optimizing your existing practices. The old truism about adaptation holds here more so than in many other processes: the better adapted you are to the status quo, the more vulnerable you are to change.

Tackling the output side moves us from the realm of technology to the realm of innovation. How do I define new outputs that are of greater value than what I produce now? While I wouldn't dismiss technology's role on the output side, it is more likely to be as an additional source of ideas for new outputs.

9:01:43 AM •  • comment