Using Sectograph to visualize my day

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A few weeks ago I stumbled upon this article by Anthony Spadafora on Tom’s Guide, where he explained how he’s using a smart display alongside his main desktop computer. That led me down a trail of various similar ideas, and I ended up using my Pixel Tablet in a similar way. Here is a quick shot of how it looks with my setup:

Here is a closer look at the tablet itself:

I’ve added a few widgets in there to help with day-to-day, including Ring (to quickly view the front door camera), Google Home (for controlling lights and temp) and ChatGPT. The main piece of this, on the right side of the screen, is a new app I found called Sectograph. It’s little confusing, but seems to be quite brilliant. Here is a quick video I just made that shows how it works:

It’s a new setup for me, so it remains to be seen whether or not I stick with it. I really like it for now, so I suspect I’ll keep it going and make little tweaks to improve things over time.

Do you have a smart device of some kind that you use alongside your computer? I’m curious to hear how you use it and what tips you have to share, so leave a comment and let us know.

The WordPress drama shows why WordPress remains the best choice

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Over the last few months, the WordPress community has been a bit of a mess. The short version of the “mess” is that Matt Mullenweg (the man behind WordPress) is not happy with WP Engine (a major host of WordPress sites) and it’s causing a lot of fallout. My friend Aaron has a great timeline of events if you want to dig in a bit deeper.

While it’s all very unfortunate and it’s hurting the WordPress ecosystem quite a lot, it also shows why WordPress remains the best platform for most websites.

Because WordPress is self-hosted (you can download it and run it wherever you want), there is only so much that Matt (or anyone else) can do to break things. He’s causing a mess, and many of our clients are hosted on WP Engine, but the direct impacts have been minimal because with WordPress you fully own your site.

Matt isn’t happy with WP Engine, but he can’t do much about it. We have a lot of clients hosted on WP Engine, and their sites are fine.

Why not Squarespace?

This is the main difference between WordPress and other platforms like Squarespace or Shopify. If Anthony Casalena (CEO of Squarespace) or Tobias Lütke (CEO of Shopify) had a similar beef, they could literally just shut websites down if they wanted to. They both seem like solid leaders, but many thought the same of Matt Mullenweg until recent months. Things can change.

We’ve actually seen this happen in small doses, like when Squarespace shut down the website for America’s Frontline Doctors. The question of “should they have shut them down?” aside, the fact is that companies like Squarespace have the power to do that with the push of a button. With WordPress, they don’t.

With WordPress, the worst case would be for your specific hosting company to decide to shut down your site, at which point you move to another host and keep going because you fully own your site.

This WordPress mess is frustrating, but it’s exactly the reason that we’ve been such a proponent of WordPress over the years. This may have long-term implications for the platform, but for now your WordPress sites will remain fully in your control and no one can take that away from you.

When preventing the Osborne Effect hurts

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Back in 1983, the Osborne Computer was selling relatively well when the founder of the company announced plans for the next version of the machine that would be coming out in the next year or so. The new one would be much better, so people stopped buying the current version and the company went bankrupt before the new one launched.

The lesson learned was to not reveal a follow-up product too early as to avoid hurting sales of the current model. It makes sense, and it’s generally a good thing, but there is still a down side.

reMarkable Paper Pro

A friend of ours just purchased reMarkable 2 tablets for their entire company, as they felt they’d be beneficial for the staff to use. It was a good move, but came just a few weeks before reMarkable surprised everyone by releasing their newest tablet (the reMarkable Paper Pro).

reMarkable kept the new tablet under very tight wraps, and even people who followed them closely had no idea that a new one was coming. This helped keep sales of the reMarkable 2 steady, but it left people (like my friend) feeling kind of bummed that they spent so much money on a batch of products that were outdated so very quickly.

reMarkable clearly learned lessons from Osbourne, but is there a better place in the middle? They protected themselves quite well and kept the older one selling, but did it hurt their reputation? I can see both sides of this, and I’m not sure what I would have done if I was reMarkable.

What would you do? How early would you announce a new product like the reMarkable Paper Pro, both to protect yourself from the Osborne Effect but also to let people situate themselves for the device that would be best for them?

The hopeful side of AI

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There is a lot coming because of AI, and much of is not good. There’s not a ton of awful things to expect, but a lot of just… yuck. Like I shared yesterday, I suspect we’ll see more spam email, more AI-powered chatbots, more automated social posts, and just a lot of “we don’t need humans for that anymore”.

However, there are things to love about what AI can bring that go beyond just saying “we can be more efficient”. For example, here are three simple ones that we’re already starting to see:

Search and augment my notes
AI is doing some neat things with note-taking, among them being the ability to search and synthesize my notes, as well as add a bit more context to them. Being able to talk to an AI about my notes while I’m in them is pretty neat, and it will continue to improve rapidly.

Search my team’s notes
I thought we’d have this by now, but hopefully soon. For our team, essentially everything is in Google Workspace. We use it for email, calendars, documents, spreadsheets, video calls, Analytics, and more. I expect very soon to be able to ask “how many design comps did we promise Acme?” or “when did Sara and I discuss her challenges with MailChimp?” and get an instant answer. It’ll be awesome.

Medical care
I’m perhaps most excited about this, because the current and near future implications are giving us the best of both worlds; AI help, but with a doctor backing it so you don’t need to be scared of the outcomes. For example, AI is becoming quite good at identifying abnormal x-rays and when it finds a problem a doctor can pull it up to confirm or deny. This is huge time-savings, it will decrease missed findings, and should lead to better outcomes for many.

I think it’s inevitable that we’re going to see far too many companies touting AI advances of “Send 10x the email to your prospects” or “Outsource your customer support to our new AI bots”, but there is a lot of good coming too.

What are some good things you hope to see from AI in the coming years?

Marketing automation works best when it’s backed by humans

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If you’ve followed my writing for very long, you know I’m not a big fan of automated emails. There are cases where they are done correctly and can be valuable, but the most common implementation seems to be “cool, let’s blast stuff out!”.

If you’re going to automate, I suggest two main rules:

  • Send it from a real address, not from “noreply”.
  • When someone responds, engage with them like a human.

It seems pretty easy, yes?

A few years back I shared the story for the bizarre marketing automation when I was looking to trade my car at Mountain View Ford, and now I’m back with a similar tale of woe. This time I was looking at lease rates on a Mustang Mach-E with Wade Ford, and the email automation and chaos was something to see. Here’s a quick look at what happened:

Note that the Mountain View story above was from five years ago. Surely dealerships have improved their technology since then, right? I guess not.

Again, this is very simple. I can make a case for some light automation in these kinds of situations, but the degree to which these salespeople ignore my actual requests for information is stunning.

As I mention in the video, I fear that AI is going to make this even worse. I still consider email to be the perfect vehicle (ha!) for working on a deal for a car, as the nature of asynchronous communication means that both parties can take some time to formulate offers and responses, but you can still move forward fairly quickly. It seems I’m in the minority here, but that doesn’t excuse the kind of sloppiness shown in that video.

If you want to run some automations with your company, they can be a great way to provide value — just make sure to keep some humans in the loop as well.

Multitaskers are the worst at multitasking

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A lot of what I write on here is about me, and this post is a great example of that. While I know that true multitasking is a myth, it’s still something I sometimes spend too much time trying to streamline. In his book “Lost and Founder“, Rand Fishkin shares this:

David Strayer, professor at the University of Utah and coauthor of “Who Multi-Tasks and Why?,” puts it nicely: The people who multitask the most tend to be impulsive, sensation-seeking, overconfident of their multitasking abilities, and they tend to be less capable of multitasking.

The last line is the one that shocked me — those that multitask the most are the ones that are the worst at it. I’m not sure why that is, but I suspect it’s overconfidence. Those that multitask less often are likely to only do it in a short-term, focused way, but those that do it a lot just try to multitask with everything that they do and it doesn’t go well. If you have a different thought on that, please share in the comments.

Super dumb laptops

This came to the surface for me because of some recent conversations I’ve been having with Robert. He’s written a handful of excellent books (I encourage you to check out “The Story Cycle“) and his approach to focus is awesome.

Recently he’s been playing with some simple word processing computers to help him write. By using a device like the AlphaSmart 3000 (below), he’s able to write with literally zero distractions.

He can write for a while, and then pull the text onto his computer later for editing. While he’s writing, literally nothing will get in his way on that device. It’s similar to why I love the Kindle Scribe; an iPad has similar features, but distractions are a key feature on the iPad while the Scribe (and AlphaSmart) helps to keep things focused. You can’t multitask on those devices even if you wanted to.

I still try to attempt multitasking more than I should, but I’m slowly inching away from it and things are always improving as a result of that.

You can escape the algorithms, but you need to work for it

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We all hear many people complaining about “the algorithms” on social media, and it’s often a legit complaint. At best, the algorithms show us a bunch of stuff we didn’t ask for. As worst, they could be affecting political outcomes.

Part of the problem is the algorithms themselves, but the other part is our overall apathy — simply using those systems is easier than building one for ourselves. However, taking the time to put together your own systems not only avoids the algorithms, but allows you to intentionally hear from a variety of sources to help avoid the filter bubble.

In a recent podcast from Seth Godin, he teed up the idea with this:

“So through deliberate action, some people, people who realize that having a variety of inputs makes them more effective, are finding ways to use the very tools that insulate us to connect us. They subscribe to blogs that they don’t agree with. They read newspapers, as long as there are newspapers, with other points of view.”

A bit later in the show, he addressed the point I’m trying to make, saying:

“And so we can wring our hands about it and complain about it, but we still have the ability to do something about it with our own mouse, with our own fingers, which is to intentionally seek out the ideas that might not be presented to us automatically. I wish I had a happier, easier automatic solution, but I don’t.”

As he points out, the “easier automatic solution” that we have today isn’t the answer. I see two paths to solving this, though.

  • For now, RSS is still likely the best way. It’s fading a bit as time goes on, but it’s still a major way that I get my news and information, and there is zero algorithm behind it. I choose what comes in, and I choose what to remove. The challenge is that it can be easy to build a filter bubble using this, so you need to be intentional about choosing from a variety of sources.
  • If things go well, the “fediverse” may take off and could be a fantastic solution. In short, it’s a way for multiple social networks to all tie together, and then you can choose how to filter the content. The idea behind it is fantastic, but it remains to be seen if enough networks (and therefore users) join in order to make it truly valuable.

There are solutions now, and more coming, but you have to work to make it happen. As Seth said in his first quote, this takes “deliberate action” and I encourage you to spend some time to set up a better way to get information for yourself.

A great place to start would be with a service like Readwise Reader (which I shared a few years ago), but there are a lot of great options to choose from.

How do you prefer to get your news and information?

Shortform for long books

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I’ve been using Blinkist for some book summaries for a few years now, and it’s great! However, I’m noticing a growing problem in the gap between long books and Blinkist, in that the “Blinks” just aren’t long enough to really share the heart of the book.

Blinkist and most related platforms are proud of the fact that they give you “15 minute summaries”. Those are a fantastic way to get an overview of a book, but then they leave a bit gap between that 15 minute summary and the full ~10 hours of reading.

Algorithms to Live By

A great example is the book Algorithms to Live By. I was listening to an episode of the “Who has time to read?” podcast, and this book came up. I don’t remember the exact wording, but their thought was “it’s a great book, but could have been 25% the length“. If you listen to that book on Audible, it’s just shy of 12 hours long.

Enter Shortform. It’s similar to Blinkist, but they give much more in-depth summaries. In the case of Algorithms to Live By, the summary was perhaps 60-90 minutes; far more detailed than Blinkist, but it saved me over 10 hours of reading time from the unnecessarily long book. This certainly has left me with a few blind spots that would have been covered in reading the full book, but the dense 60-90 minutes covered a lot of ground.

There are three other things that I like about Shortform when compared to Blinkist:

  • The summaries include links. They’re not afraid to link out to studies they cite or other articles. That alone has given me more content to store in Readwise Reader when I have a chance.
  • They cite other books. They often will share ideas and contradictions from other books (“This point from the authors is contradicted in this other book, where they say x“). They clearly have put in a lot of work to find those connections.
  • They integrate highlights with Readwise. Blinkist allows highlights, but they’re fairly rudimentary. With Shortform, my highlights sync across devices and I even have them automatically feeding into my Readwise Daily Review.

There’s still one shortcoming, but it may be an unavoidable copyright issue; I wish they’d include more actual quotes from the book inside the summary. The way they summarize the ideas is very well done, but a bit of “And the authors said this quote…” would be great. I suspect that copyright laws likely make that impossible.

All told, I encourage you to give it a shot. I still may use Blinkist for quick reviews, but so far Shortform is looking like an excellent way to digest those huge books that just aren’t worth the hours to get through.

What the web is versus what we want it to be

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In recently listening to a podcast from Gary Vaynerchuk, I realized how differently him and I see the world. While I respect what he does, and I follow a lot of his advice, it comes from a different direction.

In particular, Gary provides a ton of great ideas on how to generate increasingly large amounts of content. In the episode linked above, Gary says:

“I want to be right. I’m not talking about this because it’s how I’d like it to be. I talk about it because it’s how it is.”

When it comes to our clients at GreenMellen, I’m the same way. We work to get results regardless of how things “should be” (within the realm of morality, of course). Personally, though, I’m more interested in how the web could be versus trying to extract ever more from the web we have.

Our podcast and Meetup are both called “A Brighter Web” because that’s what we’re pushing toward, and I often share about technologies like RSS and owning your content that help bring more control back to users. It’s similar to Jay Acunzo and his idea of escaping the content hamster wheel to build more resonance with those that you reach.

Both?

There’s certainly a place for both. Jay’s approach is worthless unless you have some degree of reach so that people can see your ideas, but I think Gary goes a bit far into “50 posts per day is better than 40 posts per day”. He’s not wrong, given today’s landscape, but the ever increasing hamster wheel of content is a stressful and depressing future.

Thankfully, AI is likely going to kill that. In the short run, AI will just make the hamster wheel spin faster. Instead of 50 posts, you can do 500, or 5000. It’ll quickly become untenable for everyone, and humanity will find a place at the top.

Jay has a great two-part series where he talks about his dream for the future, and it’s a future that I’d love to see. Even better, you don’t need to wait for “the future” to start doing it; you can start right now, and you’ll likely find yourself in a great place when the hamster wheel inevitably catches on fire and burns out.

The evolution of websites

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The internet is changing rapidly, thanks to big shifts in social media and the ongoing wave of AI. Websites have largely remained the same in recent years, staying strong as the home for every business on the internet. I don’t think that will be changing anytime soon, but the nature of the sites themselves may begin to shift.

In a recent blog post, Jeremiah Owyang had some interesting predictions for where AI could be leading, I found two to be quite interesting. The first:

As AI Agents become the dominant entities on the internet, website owners will cater to them by offering Agent APIs that instantly provide information to our AI agents, rather than simulating a human click path as AI agents do today.

In short, if we’re using AI to accomplish tasks (“ChatGPT, how do I solve this problem?”), websites will need to be able provide information to other AI bots and not just humans.

However, I think this will largely be a separate layer. Many websites use APIs today (interfaces to help tools connect together), and those will simply become more robust. The main front-end of a website can remain human-focused, and the APIs can work hard to serve AI bots.

Owyang also said:

Websites won’t go away, but they will need to evolve. When humans visit websites, the content could be AI-generated and personalized to the individual user. The era of thousands of web pages is no longer needed.

This is where the front-end of websites may shift in the coming years. The challenge will be knowing enough about each user to be able to properly customize the page to their needs. This is easy for sites where you log in (the content that you see on Facebook is clearly customized to your needs), but it’s more difficult for open sites.

While it feels like websites have tons of data on us, and some do, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to get all of that info summarized. For a website to be able to really customize the content via AI, it’d need to know a lot about you instantly, which is an idea that’s actually fading further away. This is a great thing for privacy, but could lead to some tricky developments in the coming years.

Owyang’s article is quite short, and I encourage you to give it a read. How do you see websites changing in the coming years?