Some Press Release Q & A

Some Press Release Q & A

Interestingly enough I just stumbled upon an old IRC conversation where I was asking some PR questions to Robin "Roblimo" Mille, editor of NewsForge. It's pretty old (the file date says April 2004), but I thought it was still interesting...

fplanque: should we position our product against the competition by mentioning competitor names and pros/cons

roblimo: fplanque, This is touchy. A company we'll called "TinyLimp" to disguise their true identity is currently giving Linux great credibility by telling people to compare it to a product we'll call "Doors."
How many people would not have considered Linux at all without reading the TinyLimp sponsored case studies that "prove" TinyLimp products are better?

Comparisons are good when you're the underdog, but are usually not smart when you dominate a market.

(If any TinyLimp people are reading this, I hope you keep your present course, though.)

Let me add to this a bit....
*Honest* comparisons work, and dishonest ones don't. Ad maven Jerry Della Femina once said nothing can sink a bad product faster than a big ad budget.

His example was a beer hardly anyone liked that his agency designed a successful campaign for.
The problem with PR and promo is that it can get people to try a product, but that's all. If the product sucks, they'll try it and kick it to the curb. Getting more people to try a bad product just makes it fail faster.

This is the underlying point, always: Stumbling, badly written PR for a great piece of software is *always* better that slick PR for crap.
PR is simply telling the world that your project exists.

fplanque: should we write different press releases for each journalist, making each one more focused on the interests and backgroung knowledge of a particular publication?

roblimo: That would be a lot of work. I'd say it's more practical to write press release for different types of publications.

Think of a guitar notation program. You'd make one press release for music pubs, another for software pubs -- and if it's FOSS, yet another one for FOSS pubs, which is where a plea for developers or testers might be best.

Quote of the day - Strategy

"Giving up the illusion that you can predict the future is a very liberating moment. All you can do is give yourself the capacity to respond... the creation of that capacity is the purpose of strategy."
- Lord John Browne
Chairman of BP

No good GTD software for Windows?

No good GTD software for Windows?

Unfortunately, I'm beginning to think there is no decent GTD software for Windows.

I don't want anything that integrates with Outlook. I don't use Outlook.

I want something standalone. Plain and simple. Something where I can create tasks, organize them into projects, tag them into contexts and filter them a million different ways.

Searching on the web keeps pointing me towards Tudumo, which, frankly looks awesome on paper (I mean on the web). I also feels pretty good when you install it.

Now try creating 639 tasks (basically I copy/pasted a part of my todo list for b2evolution) and the thing turns into a slow bloated .NET application nightmare.

Who needs a todo list manager when you only have 10 things to do anyway ?

Inbox Zero!

Inbox Zero!

Woohoo! For the first time in years my email inbox is empty!

It is really odd actually: now Thunderbird looks like it's frozen and stuck in redrawing the right side of the screen. It's disturbingly white!

But it feels good. The last time that happened was actually 2004! (based on the oldest email that was in my inbox...)

So how did I do it? No merit: I just moved it all into ACTION folders! :roll:

Well actually, it's more subtle than that:

  • anything that wasn't actionable got deleted or archived

  • anything that could be answered or done in less than 2 minutes got handled and archived/deleted.

  • anything that required more than 2 minutes got into an action folder.

So far, it's basically plain David Allen's "Getting Things Done".

And so far: there's a hell of a lot of stuff to do in the ACTION folders! :(

This is where I'm going to start the real optimization... inspired by Tim Ferris' "4 hour workweek". For each item I need to decide:

  • Can I *not* act on it and forget about it?

  • Can I delegate it to someone else?

  • Can I automate it so I don't get the same problem again in the future?

  • and last resort: just do the goddam thing! :p

The unofficial SxSW music show

I'm currently in Austin, Texas attending SxSW interactive. I am not attending the music festival that follows next week, BUT... today I had a very cool cab driver who told me all about it. (He's playing in a band himself!)

There are like 250,000 people attending. And the festival is only on the evenings from 8pm to laaate. Plus, it's only for indie bands.

So what happens with a quarter million people all day long?

Well... the majors would throw parties in giant warehouses and would fly in some of their major artists... Basically the unofficial festival ends up bigger than the official SxSW music. Pretty wild eh?

But it gets better: now some bands think it's even cooler to play unofficial, because it makes it "indier" than the official.

Anyways, kudos to the Austin cab drivers. On average they are the coolest I've ridden with! :P