Dealing With Critical Comments
7. January 2009
Des Walsh
One of the most common concerns raised when the subject of business blogging is under discussion is what to do about critical or hostile comments. I’ve been explaining the theory for a few years now in various forums and in various countries. But an experience this week showed me I still had (have) some learning to do.
What happened was that I had a critical comment on one of my blog posts here the other morning. It wasn’t a nasty comment, in fact very mild and I wasn’t completely sure the comment was about this blog or about another, the subject of the blog post being commented on. And on re-reading the post I realise I may have implicitly invited some criticism.
But to be frank, it annoyed me. And I felt aggrieved.
Which was a perfectly human response.
Just not a very helpful one.
After all, I talk to people about how to respond to this sort of thing. I include reference to it in presentations. I write about it.
So this was where the rubber hit the road, so to speak.
What’s the advice I give others?
Like others who specialisz in consulting or coaching in the field of blogging and other social media, my response to questions and concerns about critical comments on business blogs has been along the lines of:
- it goes with being part of the conversation
- people are talking about you and your company anyway (or you hope they are!) so you are just hearing what is already being said
- by dealing with criticism openly, you help your clients, your market get a sense of what you stand for, your principles
- you also get the opportunity to put your side of the conversation, not letting it go by default
I believe those points are all valid. But they are just principles, guides. Dealing with the actual experience means that I and other business bloggers need to take account not just of the theory - our logical response - but of our emotional response. A test of our emotional intelligence (EQ) if you will.
So after these reflections, I left a response to the comment, seeking clarification. There has been no reply yet and somehow I feel there will not be one.
I’m actually grateful to the commenter. His comment argued (if I understood it correctly) that my posts should offer more value for readers. Working on that can’t be a bad thing, just as getting over the dent to my pride can’t be a bad thing.
And on the bigger picture of offering my services to help businesses understand and manage the blog-enabled conversations, I believe what I’m learning from this experience will help me be more genuinely and helpfully sympathetic the next time the issue of critical comments is raised.
Picture credit: kretyen, via Flicker - Creative Commons licence
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build your home business and work from home
7. January 2009
dc
The New Year has kicked start and today is my little boy’s third day of kindie… he’s a bigger boy this year! I’m waiting to get back to my home office routine by next week as soon as he starts his class proper. It’s still orientation week with only two hours of school right now.
I was happy to see some sales in my clickbank account during the festive period. Looks like I need to work harder this year if I still want to work from home. Though the newspaper is full of news that relate to credit, job retrenchment and interest rates cut every other day, we still need to continue working hard and staying positive.
There are many work at home businesses and opportunities that can potentially bring in good income. If you are planning to set up a webstore, an affiliate store or ecommerce store, you may want to check out Datafeedr. I’ve been using it for a while and the support has been great. Whether you are setting up a store selling sexy corsets or wedding favors, Datafeedr can help you build unlimited affiliate datafeed ecommerce stores in just a few simple steps. So if working from home is what you envisioned in 2009, it’s time to check out your home business resources and get started!
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More Designers Opting Out of Runway Shows
6. January 2009
Orli Sharaby
As we reported back in September, there’s suddenly a whole new world out there to fashion designers who may not have the cash or the desire to stage an expensive runway show. The pervasiveness of the web and accessibility of high quality multimedia equipment/tools have made it possible for designers to reach a much wider audience at a lower cost, both to the environment and to their bank accounts. For a while, this practice of shunning the catwalk was limited to underground, avant garde designers constrained by small budgets. But by the end of 2008, more and more mainstream fashion houses are saying no to Bryant Park. At the February shows in NY, at least five high profile designers will be absent - Vera Wang, Betsey Johnson, Carmen Marc Valvo, Monique Lhuillier and Naeem Khan. But while we can speculate about their reasons for deciding not to show, the PR firm representing the latter two, Paul Wilmot, claims that the designers’ decision has nothing to do with financial concerns.
[via NY Mag: The Cut]
By Orli Sharaby | © PSFK, 2009. | Article Link | Comments | More stories in: <a href="Fashion, Fashion Designers, Trends In The US">Fashion, Fashion Designers, Trends In The US and <a href="economy, Fashion Designers, fashion show, runway">economy, Fashion Designers, fashion show, runway
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Clay Shirky: Traditional Media is Going Down
6. January 2009
Dan Gould
NYU professor and author Clay Shirky weighs in at the Guardian with a no holds barred media forecast for the new year. “2009 is going to be a bloodbath” he says. Shirky envisions that traditional media (newspapers, magazines, TV) will have to radically shift the way they deliver content in order to survive - mainly by migrating to web-based platforms. He believes the recession will have a long-term positive effect on these media industries, leading to clarity of purpose for those that move away from traditional physical formats and diversify into multiple distribution channels. And, on a positive note, he believes the book industry will continue to thrive, based on a future of print on demand:
The book world is more secure. I think the big revolution is going to be print on demand. Imagine only having one browsing copy of every book in a bookstore. You could say “Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers looks good”, and out pops a brand new copy. Why does a bookstore or a publisher have to be in the shipping and warehousing business?
The Guardian: “The shape of things to come”
By Dan Gould | © PSFK, 2009. | Article Link | Comments | More stories in: <a href="Advertising & Branding, Media & Publishing, Web & Technology, Work & Business">Advertising & Branding, Media & Publishing, Web & Technology, Work & Business and
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Housing Development Draws Inspiration From Shanytowns
6. January 2009
Jeff Squires
After watching how new, American style, cookie-cutter housing developments in Mexico quickly became retrofitted by tenants to accommodate their informal businesses, Teddy Cruz, an architect and professor at the University of California, San Diego is attempting to integrate the same social and architectural models that he observed in Mexican shantytowns to modern housing developments in low-income communities back in the States.
Cruz noticed that many of the shantytowns he visited in Mexico operated very communally with an abundance of shared space. This “sophisticated social collaboration,” according to Cruz, enables residents to share resources and look out for each other in way that modern suburban developments preclude.
He states:
Architecture has been so distant from the politics and economics of developments…We need to rethink the way we’ve been developing, and what we mean when we talk about housing, density, community, and neighborhood.
In addition to including spaces where residents can operate their businesses, the new developments would also offer sweat equity, allowing people who help with construction to gain rent credits for their work.
By Jeff Squires | © PSFK, 2009. | Article Link | Comments | More stories in: <a href="Architecture, Design, Home & Garden, Trends In The US">Architecture, Design, Home & Garden, Trends In The US and <a href="Architecture, suburbs">Architecture, suburbs
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Sharing Land: A Growing Revolution
6. January 2009
Scott Lachut
Although community gardens might be nothing new, two UK based websites, Landshare and LandFit (temporarily on hiatus), are hoping to expand the concept in a radical way by putting would-be gardeners who lack the space in contact with those that would like to see their underutilized property put to good use. Time and again we’ve seen the internet’s powerful social networking capabilities bring people together in interesting ways to build communities and create change, and like most successful endeavors this idea is starting small, connecting individuals in their own neighborhoods and backyards. As we begin to understand the impact of large scale farming on our health and the health of our environment, keeping our food locally raised makes increasing sense. So while food and eating have always been central in bringing people together at the table, these two sites ask us to rethink this relationship and take it one step further back, to its source.
[via Treehugger]
By Scott Lachut | © PSFK, 2009. | Article Link | Comments | More stories in: <a href="Environmental, Food & Drink, Home & Garden, Trends In The UK">Environmental, Food & Drink, Home & Garden, Trends In The UK and <a href="Community, farming, gardening, LandFit, Landshare, locally grown, social networking">Community, farming, gardening, LandFit, Landshare, locally grown, social networking
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Future of Work: Getting Things Done as a Freelancer
6. January 2009
Dan Gould
Chris Hardwick is a freelance writer, musician, voice over artist, stand up comedian and TV host among other things. That’s a lot of hats to wear and activities to juggle for any mere human. As a remedy to this busy, schizophrenic lifestyle of a freelancer, he recently tried to apply some of the methods of today’s popular self help books to make his work flow more efficient. It’s a humorous (yet informative) side note to our recent discussion about the future of work that sheds light on the unique, hectic but rewarding lifestyle of being your own boss and trying to do it all in the freelance economy.
He explains:
Time-management books command huge swaths of bookstore shelf space and sell tens of thousands of copies a year, but I always figured they applied more to stapler-stealing cubicle jockeys than someone like me. I am a freelancer. My services are available to anyone at any time. In a former life I was probably a whore. In this one, I am responsible for two cartoon voice-overs, three writing jobs, a movie soundtrack, my stand-up comedy act, TV hosting gigs, and half of a musical-comedy duo. Don’t get me wrong; in this economy, I’m grateful for the work. But without any kind of 9-to-5 structure, it’s a lot to keep track of.
So how do I handle it? Poorly. My days are like eBay shipments: a few tangible things and a whole lot of packing peanuts. I obviously need help being the boss of me. So I decided to try an experiment: I’d spend two weeks absorbing, in succession, three well-known productivity systems and see if I could find one that worked for those of us who count income in 1099s instead of W-2s. I already owned David Allen’s Getting Things Done; Gina Trapani, editor of the blog Lifehacker, further recommended Julie Morgenstern’s Never Check E-Mail in the Morning and Timothy Ferriss’ The 4-Hour Workweek. That made three, and three examples is all you need for a magazine article.
Wired: “Diary of a Self-Help Dropout: Flirting With the 4-Hour Workweek”
By Dan Gould | © PSFK, 2009. | Article Link | Comments | More stories in: <a href="Web & Technology, Work & Business, Youth">Web & Technology, Work & Business, Youth and <a href="Freelance, Freelance Economy, Future of work, GTD, jobs, Time Management">Freelance, Freelance Economy, Future of work, GTD, jobs, Time Management
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DIY Car Runs on Garbage
6. January 2009
Dan Gould
Instructables has an incredible do-it-yourself project that shows the step by step instructions to modify a car to run on garbage. Using a process called gasification, which uses heat to transform solid biomass into a natural gas like fuel, this homemade engine runs on nearly anything. Wood, food scraps, leaves - pretty much any kind of solid, dry organic matter you can get your hands on will make this car go. Equally surprising is the fact that gasification has been in use for quite a long time.
Instructables explains:
Did you know that over one million vehicles in Europe ran onboard gasifiers during WWII to make fuel from wood and charcoal, as gasoline and diesel were rationed or otherwise unavailable? Long before there was biodiesel and ethanol, we actually succeeded in a large-scale, alternative fuels redeployment– and one which curiously used only cellulosic biomass, not the oil and sugar based biofuel sources which famously compete with food.
This redeployment was made possible by the gasification of waste biomass, using simple gasifiers about as complex as a traditional wood stove. These small-scale gasifiers are easily reproduced (and improved) today by DIY enthusiasts using simple hammer and wrench technology.
Instructables: “Convert your Honda Accord to run on trash”
[via Geekologie]
By Dan Gould | © PSFK, 2009. | Article Link | Comments | More stories in: <a href="Automotive, Environmental, Transport & Travel">Automotive, Environmental, Transport & Travel and <a href="Cars, DIY, Gasification">Cars, DIY, Gasification
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Generative Installation Evolves as Audio and Visual Influence Each Other
6. January 2009
Jeff Squires
Universal Everything, a commercial studio blending design and art in the UK, has recently installed a beautiful piece in the John Madejski Garden at the Victoria & Albert Museum. Entitled ‘Forever,’ the installation consists of a large video wall displaying endless animations responding to an ever changing soundtrack.
Floating just above a pond in the middle of the garden, the installation is formed from generative music and generative visuals. Essentially, the visuals are being created by the music that’s being played and the music that’s being playing is also being influenced by the visuals. Got that?
What’s interesting about the piece, is how it evolves. Because of the generative design system at the heart of the installation, a unique blend audio-visual is displayed everyday. Apparently, it’s based on the same kinds of micro-patterns as Mozart’s generative minuets, but on a more detailed level.
[via Creative Review]
By Jeff Squires | © PSFK, 2009. | Article Link | Comments | More stories in: <a href="Arts & Culture, Design, Trends In Europe, Web & Technology">Arts & Culture, Design, Trends In Europe, Web & Technology and <a href="audio, generative, media art, visual">audio, generative, media art, visual
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Kengo Kuma’s MUJI Houses
6. January 2009
Christine Huang
Kengo Kuma has taken the understated, elegant aesthetic of Japanese retailer Muji and applied it to two newly designed prefabricated houses. Kuma created the houses for Muji and stuck to the brand’s subdued color palette and forms. The houses are modestly sized and made of standardized parts (available in several variations), with each house starting at around $200,000 USD. Yanko offers more details:
The Window House is based on the idea from feudal-era tea houses where the windows are placed to give strategic views outside, like picture frames, and are mounted low, so that the views are best enjoyed when you are seated. In addition, the house has several internal windows that allow you to peek through to other rooms in the house. The window locations are variable, so you can adjust the design to suit your specific site and living tastes.
The Tree House has been built many times and this page describes, in pictures, the incredible variation the Muji houses have. It is designed to harness natural light and energy. From the looks of the diagrams \, the floors receiving direct sunlight absorb the energy and radiate it back into the house. The house has a open interior balcony to introduce cross breezes combined with a chimney effect. In addition, energy-efficient materials are used elsewhere.
Yanko Design: Muji Houses by Kengo Kuma
By Christine Huang | © PSFK, 2009. | Article Link | Comments | More stories in: <a href="Advertising & Branding, Architecture, Arts & Culture">Advertising & Branding, Architecture, Arts & Culture and
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