Category: Blog

I will go to japan again later this year and I can’t avoid thinking how much the web hasn’t evolved for many of the japanese websites I saw when I first decided to visit it.

It’s really curious to see that many websites still in a 1980’s look.
It was curious back then, 6 years ago, but now? With all the fast paced growth of the web, layouts and ux improvements, seeing many japan websites retain that old style is sure strange.

I wonder why, maybe there’s a lot of room to grow, or maybe they’re just working (so why fix it in the first place, like craigslist).
Who knows.

Some years ago I was very skeptical of marketing and to some extent I still am.
But after reading Ogilvy “On Advertising” I discovered the many faces of marketing, the good one and the bad one.

Given the fact that the practical goal of marketing is to increase revenue (well, usually), it’s easy as a marketer to choose a shortcut that will boost the revenue in the short term.
Many people in the world do this and I don’t believe it’s only because of marketing.

The “shortcut” is something we see very often, think of politics.
It’s easy to say that we will stop doing war, we will lower taxes and give 1000$ to each unemployed.
Time will then come and show how this claim was impossible to realize in the given time.
Promotions like this are the same thing: shortcuts.

Shortcuts are at the essence of bad marketing and, if I think more widely, to bad behavior in general.
Shortcuts when used in conjunction with relationships might lead to “saying things without explaining”, leading to misinterpretation.
Shortcuts when used in any work might produce results, yes, but might not be sustainable in the long term.

I know…. not every shortcut is necessarily bad, but a shortcut is, by definition, “A means of saving time and effort”.
And while I recognize that saying “Shortcuts are evil” is an over-generalization, I truly believe that we are too much accustomed to bad marketing that we believe shortcuts are a necessary evil.

They are not, shortcuts often deprive us from the joy of learning and improving because you don’t allow learning do go deep into your thinking, you don’t materialize your learning into some actual thing you can apply.
You only know the shortcut, not the general rule.

Getting back to the topic of marketing, good marketing, yesterday I was pleased to see the video ad for google translate .
This is good marketing, it enlighten you, it gives you power, it shows you how you can do more and be more, removing the blocks you have in life.

The more the internet is in my life, the more I feel giving control to the web might create some unforeseeable issue in the future.

Much like the issue behind the stealing of the “n” username in twitter, I feel like we can lose it all in a glimpse.
All of our web identity, code, power.
Just one click and it’s destroyed.

I am not so naïve to think that I can secure myself from this threats, but still I need some backup.
That’s why lately I started using the Two Factor auth for the most important parts of my “web-life”. It’s a great way to secure my identity.
But there’s a lot that can be improved since I could lost the access with one deletion.

To fix this, I decided to triple backup the code in 3 secure system.
I feel a bit paranoid, but since I once got locked out, I hope it will save my from incurring into the same issue twice 🙂

There should really be a “No complain day”.
A day we’re not allowed to complain in any way( not even in our minds ).

What could be done in that day, how would your perception of the world shift?

No complaining doesn’t mean you shouldn’t state your opinion, it means to clear up ego and the information overload that ego adds to the conversation.

When you complain, you add useless information (that we, as human, think it’s really important information although it’s not), you add judgement, you add prejudice.

It’s hard to remove ego. I find myself thinking a lot about that. I am full of ego, full of useless information, and although I can’t call myself a “person who complains a lot”, I know that there’s lot to do, to learn, to improve.

No complain day might just be that: a start toward a better you, a better me, a better world.