I’ve started using Google Reader’s shared items for linking interesting bits that cross my path. You can follow my shared items feed (also see my blog sidebar) and interact on Google Buzz. I plan to do a weekly recap here for those who prefer reading them that way.

• Brand Autopsy: Tough Love For Starbucks
  Published: March 6, 2010
  Source: brandautopsy.typepad.com
  My Note: John Moore gets tough with Starbucks: I might still credit some of the ideas he discounts, but his point is still quite clear. Soliciting input implies you're going to use it, else it's a disingenuous false face to the customer. Bad Starbucks.
  It’s been almost two years since Starbucks jumped into the deep waters of social media with their MyStarbucksIdea.com program. This is a website where customers submit and discuss ideas on ways Starbucks can improve its business. Over 80,000 ideas have...

I’m sitting in a downtown Starbucks in Winnipeg, doing some online work, drinking a coffee. There’s a sign on the door outside, and another one on the second door in the entryway that says “Attention Customers: Due to technical difficulties we will ONLY be accepting credit, debit, or Starbucks cards. NO CASH!! Sorry for the inconvenience – Team Broadway”. I should mention that the all-caps words are highlighted in orange and green, and double-underlined.

Everyone (well, almost) stops to read the first sign, standing outdoors, sometimes holding the door open as they read. Those who skip the first sign will usually do the same process at the second sign. And in case you ignored both of those, there’s one on the cash register.

I’m enjoying Seth Godin’s latest book, Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?. In his chapter on “Becoming the Linchpin”, he has a great diagram on page 52, which I’ve reproduced here. His linchpin discussion is a good illustration of the variance between price and value. I always cringe when a client reacts negatively to my billing rate (which is low for the industry). If they say, “I wish I could bill my time at that rate,” I know they haven’t got it and may never “get it.” I want to ask them what rate they pay their mechanic or their accountant. It’s a question of the value contributed, not the price paid. This is the problem with people who try to do too much tweaking on the product of a good designer… they don’t understand that they’re paying for expertise and then negating its value. Perhaps they’d rather have an expert at minimum wage?

You get what you pay for.

You got more than you bargained for.

Ever notice that phrases like these mean something negative when on the face of it, they shouldn’t? You pay for something, and you get it. Naturally. You bargain for something, and get a little extra. Who wouldn’t be happy about that?

Yet these phrases don’t mean good things. These phrases mean there’s an unanticipated shortfall in the deal, and you’ve been shortchanged in one way or another.

Money-back guarantee. In other words, if you don’t get what you’re supposed to, you can return it for a refund. This is your bare-minimum: both sides of the ledger balance out, one way or the other. Dollar-for-dollar, equivalent value.

As good as most of them are it’s a rare TED video that makes you want to stand and applaud with the crowd even though you’re only streaming a recording of a past event. But this TED Talk by Pranav Mistry has some truly jaw-dropping stuff, particularly for those who haven’t much considered the extent to which we could be interfacing our digital world our the natural one. Some of this looks like genuine science fiction. Haven’t heard of him? I hadn’t either. “Pranav Mistry is a PhD student in the Fluid Interfaces Group at MIT’s Media Lab. Before his studies at MIT, he worked with Microsoft as a UX researcher; he’s a graduate of IIT. Mistry is passionate about integrating the digital informational experience with our real-world interactions.” He is also the inventor of SixthSense.

Ten years ago I was educating people about what they might expect from their websites. For many medium and small businesses, it was their first website, and they wanted to know how it was going to make them money. Nowadays, a web presence has become a part of almost every business’ “price of admission”. Ten years ago, you weren’t credible without a business card and a Yellow Pages listing, and people were already seeing that before long a website would become a part of the minimum credibility standard.

Last night I was at Aqua Books for the official launch of the new website for The Writers Collective of Manitoba, pictured in the tiny thumbnail. Last night I projected some much larger screenshots of it onto a large screen while I droned on about all it could do. Then Eve turned on the “Applause” sign. Not long after that, we ate cookies and drank hot chocolate and punch and beer and wine. But not all of them, and not all at once. My point in mentioning it is that I developed the site for the Collective in the course of my work under the name of WebRiggers.net. I think the site will work out swimmingly for them.

A few weeks ago I accused bookseller McNally Robinson of missing the plot twist following their entry into bankruptcy protection. What I said was (1) that they had expanded at the wrong time, in the wrong way and (2) that they didn’t have an effective strategy for competing with online book sales.

Well, last week McNally emerged from bankruptcy protection and Paul McNally made some public comment on what went wrong, as he saw it. The biggest single factor he cites was the failure of their Don Mills store to meet the sales targets for which they had hoped. He speculated that their strategy of community involvement maybe didn’t play as well in T-Dot, but it has also been noted that the Don Mills mall in which they were located has been a disappointment to many of its retail tenants.

Via TED’s Best of the Web Talks, I discovered J.K. Rowling’s Harvard Commencement Address in June 2008 on The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination. The subject brings up an important concept — the fact that although we list only successes on our CVs, it is typically the failures that teach us more. Comparatively, success perhaps teaches us very little. When was the last time you judged someone as qualified because of the lessons learned in their last failure? Granted, this might not be the single best criteria, but someone who’s never failed may well be an underachiever stuck within the constraints of mediocre thinking.

J.K. Rowling:

It’s been announced today that McNally Robinson is closing two of its stores and have entered bankruptcy protection for restructuring.

For those not in Winnipeg, it’s worth mentioning that the independent bookseller is a local success story, having started here in 1981 and grown to have stores not only in Winnipeg, but also in Saskatoon, Toronto, and New York as well as online. Many Winnipeggers have a “feel-good” sense about supporting this local option for their book purchases, and it’s a popular spot for book launches as well. Most locations also feature a (non-Starbucks) café/restaurant of some sort, the Prairie Ink Café. To be clear, I like McNally Robinson as a bookstore. The locations I’ve been in are all large with a good selection of titles and special promotion for local authors.