đď¸ LongForm
Want to reduce the noice and just focus on things with a little more meat - the this category is for you. Like so much on this site we have a ‘WIP’ as i take some out - and put some in - but safe for at least starting in 2026.
Why Don't We All Have Agents
I got a voice mail from my agent this evening. She opened with her usual apologies for being out of touch but she wanted to talk to me about four contracts that were coming to a head. Details needed to be nailed down.
Four contracts? I knew about the transformation contract, but as for the other three ⌠I had no idea what she was talking about. What else had she found?
Color me intrigued.
Of course I called her back and she dived in head first, at her usual ra ta tat tat machine gun conversational speed ⌠and I listened - I mean what was my choice!
.. and to find out what happened then … well we have a podcast for that … a short one mind you … 6 minutes and 41 seconds.
A MicroBlog Enhancement Request
I like that micro blog can be used as an rss reader and a mastodon reader and a microblog time line reader and âŚ.
BUT
I wonder what code change would be needed to allow me (the reader) to filter my timeline on (say)
- mastodon only
- blog site rss only
- Microblog only
- etc etc
Currently I am unfollowing every Mastodon account in Micro Blog that I have historically followed - and picking them up in Mastodon.
I have never followed a web site in MB
I follow
- RSS in NetNewsWire
- All Substack Newsletters in Substack app
- All other newsletters in StoopInbox
This is because I think understanding where the post emanates contributes to me understanding more of the context.
I get the beauty of having everything coming in to a single place - and sometimes that would be good - but not always.
Podcasts. You Need A Player AND Something To Listen To.
Interesting that it isnât just Mastodon that seems to be in sudden growth mode. The Mastodon questions relating to ‘how to get started’ and ‘who to follow’ are just as applicable to Podcasts - even though they are much more established. That said, it is clear that even for the long time listener, checking in and making sure that once you have found the best stuff to listen (often by asking around) that you have the best stuff to listen to it on!
This post then is my contribution to answering;
đ¸ What is the best app?
đ¸ Which podcasts should I follow and why?
Caveat - I am an Apple ecosystem person - so my podcast player recommendations MIGHT not be available on your platform of choice. Sorry.
Which Player
As an Apple user, you might expect me to use the Apple player and you would be wrong. Every now and then I do revisit Appleâs core apps to make sure I have a good reason to be outside of their ecosystem. I last checked the Apple podcast world 3 months ago. NOPE.
Not to say it isnât a good app - its just that it doesnât work for me and this is primarily because I follow to a LOT of podcasts and listen to very few of them. As a result, I need an easy mechanism to find, categorize, triage, organize and listen.
There are few apps that I haven’t downloaded, most donât work for me (or more accurately, they donât offer enough to make me want to switch). They might work for you - all good, this isn’y the kind of piece to get into that debate.
This is what I use and why it specifically works for me.
I have used Castro for a long time. It really is a wonderful app and I would not knock it. Castro and Marco Armentâs Overcast are the two podcast apps that I kept coming back to when I looked outside of Apple. When I first explored podcast apps beyond Apple, I tried them both. Castro won out. I just couldnât get my head around the way Overcast worked. Castro in comparison was very intuitive. Why relearn when what you have works?
And then 3 months ago that all changed. As I referenced above, I do explore app alternatives from time. Changes had been made to the Apple app - so i explored and hadnât realized that Overcast had itself been through a massive redesign.
Oh my.
The Apple changes were good - but nothing that helped me. BUT Overcast won out and I have been using it ever since. This is why.
I subscribe to over 100 podcasts (donât judge me) and generally listen to a podcast for somewhere between 30 and 90 minutes each day. It does get over 90 minutes from time to time - mainly depending on what else is going on in my life. Clearly there is lot that I follow and donât listen to. So as I wrote above when looking at a podcast app, find, categorize, triage, organize and listen are all important functions.
My Process
-
Every single podcast I follow is categorized into one or more place ⌠âtechâ, âpoliticsâ, âbbc and nprâ, âhumourâ, âmusicâ ⌠you get the picture.
-
As part of my morning âfeed catchupâ i triage all the new arrivals and delete anything I know I won’t be even thinking about listening to.
-
When I am ready to listen - the category filter helps me do an initial narrow down and then I choose from within.
Resultant Benefits for me. (Your mileage may vary)
đ¸ Very intuitive
đ¸ Fast and efficient triage
đ¸ Synching across multiple devices
đ¸ Their app even works on the Mac
đ¸ The Ability to categorize to quickly choose ‘the tone’.
The Unique Controls in Settings I won’t go into - suffice to say, the possible refinements of what you MIGHT choose to do is extraordinary - but were I to tell you that I have not changed one setting - you would know that this app is very much in synch with how I think.
Through all of this you will notice I have made no mention of speeding up / slowing down podcasts (which is possible in most players) - because I donât do it, even with the sheer number of shows I triage. I was tempted once, tried it, didnât like, never bothered again. To me, it is similar to reading a bookâs cliff notes and assuming you have read the book.
What I Listen To
At any given moment I might have up to 40 unplayed podcasts in the queue. (Right now I am at 21, I know because I just counted. In fact - well - here they are.)
Some shows I simply have the latest version of ready to go if I feel inpired … No Such Thing, The Gist, John Hodgman being good examples.
Other shows, like Zane Lowe and Rockentours might have multiple episodes - because I really want to hear the guest. Example below - note that Zane Lowe has two shows in the hopper, Chris Lockhead has THREE. But - will I really get round to listening nearly 5 hours of Lockhead - just across these three shows - probably not, so over time they wil get removed without listening.
And finally - you will see that two of my twenty one shows are my own podcasts. Yes I do listen to them once they are published and I keep the latest Season in the Inbox for easy discovery if I need a link for someone. Season Three just kicked off - so only two shows so far.
Recommendations
So what shows would I specifically recommend? Well again - the point is what are you interested in? If I knew that, I could be of more help, so I reduced the list to a solid personal 10 - which are in no particular order, but if I know what kind of stuff you like - I probably have a view - with the exception of Sports!
đ¸ Chris Lockhead and Category Pirates - marketing and business
đ¸ Rob Long - 15 minutes of delight
đ¸ Peter Kafka - media meets technology
đ¸ Rockenteurs - a music podcast rom Gary Kemp and Guy Pratt
đ¸ Zane Lowe - music
đ¸ Sam Harris - for quiet relfection
đ¸ John Hodgman - he’s just funny
đ¸ Ezra Klein - considered thought, good guests
đ¸ Mike Pesca - The Gist - a daily ‘news’ show from an ex PBS presenter
đ¸ People First - my own People First podcast
That’s it - do you have any recommendations and thoughts?
Sad To See A Small Company You Know Declare Bankruptcy
No names - no pack drill to protect the innocent, but prompted to write this because while it is sad, I donât like history to be rewritten.
The official statement reads that it has declared bankruptcy because of âpoor economic conditions since Covid and increased costs and delays associated with expansion plans.â
Sure - and - it was clear when I talked to them that the company had a difficult route even before Covid. Capital investment needed was massive to deliver the physical spaces needed to conduct the business, meanwhile the funding being raised was easily an order of magnitude too little to deliver on the promise.
Covid might have accelerated the demise but it was plain for anyone to see with even a tad due-diligence, which continues to remain in short supply.
Not only that …
âThe group had one facility and was in the process of setting up two larger ones in xxx and xxx, while also developing an online app that would âŚ..â
Itâs over 2 years since I last talked to them - but at that time they were âworking on an appâ. How long does âan appâ take?
đĽ The Silencing, 2020 - â â ½
It is what it is - it was what it was - a 'free' movie on Netflix
đĽ The Batman, 2022 - â â â ½
I'm a sucker for Batman. Not the best and so DARK ... not the storyline, the cinematography. At times just watching a black screen. Probably more a commentary on the TV than the movie, but still...Â
I guess if they are trying to get us back to the movie houses... It makes sense?
đĽ Enola Holmes 2, 2022 - â â â ½
Having watched âround 1â ⌠I knew what to expect and I wasnât disappointed.
Do you remember Rod McKuen?
He was the bestselling poet in American history. What happened?
Was never a fan - and hadn’t thought of him for decades - but there is no doubt that at the time he was big.
Just one paragraph that opened my eyes …
In the mid-1960s McKuen discovered the Belgian singer Jacques Brel and his fellow chansonniers, performers in the story-song tradition who were popular in the cabarets of Europe but hadnât yet made inroads in the U.S. market. McKuen translated and sang a number of Brelâs songs, and fully rewrote Brelâs song âLe Moribondâ as âSeasons in the Sun,â which was recorded by the Kingston Trio. (It would later be a No. 1 hit for the singer Terry Jacks.)
… in my mind, Scott Walker and more recently Marc Almond were the two ‘Walker Channelers’. Never had any idea that Rod was another.
Feedland Feedback
This post was getting too long and confusing in draft mode. So - instead I am writing a short post and will then append with comments to cover off each point I want to make. A living post if you will!
The genesis of the post is that @dave commented on one of my posts about Feedland suggesting that I publish a post about Feedland here.
First off, I am a big fan of the functionality of Feedland and in awe of how @dave - much like @manton - just keeps delivering enhancements and extensions to his world without the teams of hundreds - if not thousands - that VC backed startups seems to ‘need’.
As an ex 1999.io user (I was there before MicroBlog properly launched) .. I recognized the interface immediately. There is a style that Dave uses. Not my favorite - but I appreciate the consistency.
I found it pretty easy to set up Feedland - and it ‘just worked’. Since then, there are things I have discovered that would make for an even easier life (at least if you were talking about my life that is).
I will post thoughts into the comments below in an attempt to keep simple and less ‘rambly’.
One Week to Respond to an Email using a Template
I wrote a long email to Substack last week with a combination of personal comments together with some comments received from readers.
I opened the email with;
âNo questions - but definitely a lot of input. Most of which I have written to you about in the past and generally received a ‘thanks we will let the dev team knowâ kind of response ⌠and then nothing.â
Precisely one week later a template response âŚ
âWe will pass your feedback along to our Product team. However, please note their team does not respond to messages directly, so it is expected you won’t receive a follow up. â
#NailedIt - other than I wasnât expecting to wait a week for a template response.
Why Some of Your Salespeople Are Dragging â and How to Fix It
“To get deals over the line in todayâs high-pressure sales environment, sellers must undertake new, challenging activities outside their comfort zones. The ongoing need for agility is taking its toll: In a recent Gartner survey of more than 900 B2B sellers, 89% report feeling burned out and 54% report actively job seeking.”
“nearly six in 10 sellers describe the leadership of their sales organization as not understanding what âreallyâ motivates sellers.”
“Sellers experiencing drag are plagued by workday boredom and distraction. They procrastinate. They âgo through the motionsâ to satisfy activity-tracking requirements. Meanwhile, progress on true priorities languishes.”
and and and … you can read it all on HBR
.. meanwhile the word ‘buy’ appears once in the entire article … and even then … well see for yourself
“Maximize seller buy-in by being transparent.”
That is the only reference to ‘buying’ is the need for the sales person to have buy in to what leadership is up to.
‘Customer’ is mentioned 7 times …
I am at a loss to understand how to improve the sales process without really talking about the buying process and customers … I know crazy talk right?
ANARCHY
Then again, the article was written by a bunch of Gartner analysts.
My Speciality ? Generality !
A slightly edited version of a post originally published on February 14th 2016 @ Beyond Bridges, now archived here
A friend and reader of this blog just sent me this link, which is a third party version of the LinkedIN map below. It seems to be limited due to LinkedIN's API constraints, so it can't map more than 499 of your connections. That said, there does seem to be a lot more information and analysis that surrounds the graph. Andy it means YOU can go try it out on your network. Thank you David.
A good friend of mine messaged me through LinkedIN. He is a fast thinking, witty, bright, intelligent, big thinking kind of guy. He's also interested in his next gig - so let me know if you want an introduction. Anyway, to my point. He had been on my LinkedIN profile and commented;
I think you would be well served to pare that list (of skills I had listed in my summary)Â to maybe 4-5 distinct and specialized areas where you really shine better than the rest. Things like Leadership, Marketing, Communications are too generic and readily available in the marketplace.
And I agreed. In fact, so much so that IÂ pared it down to zero. My skill list is summarized in another part of the profile anyway. But it got me to thinking.
I am a big fan of Mike Pesca over at Slate who delivers a daily podcast called The Gist. Try it. You won't regret it. A couple of weeks ago he had Eric Weiner on as a guest, and they spent some time talking about where genius comes from. Turns out that Eric has just written a new book about 'how genius happens'. One of my takeaways was that genius emerges from generalism - not speciality. For example, he talked about the fact that Einstein was not the most knowledgeable physicist of his time, but his value was that he was broad in both interest and knowledge. A 'Renaissance man' if you will. This an absolute opposite to what we live with today. We eschew the 'polymath' in favor of the 'monomath'. From the site Gain Weight Journal;
Unfortunately, we live in an era of monomaths now. This means specialists. The problem with that is that people get stuck with one way of thinking, they have blinders on, and cannot see the big picture, including the relationships and similarities between different things.
I know, even our education system is driven to a singular focus and it seems to be getting worse. For myself, I focussed on Maths and Physics in my education from the age of 15. Maybe I was bored. Maybe I could see the future, but despite that formal focus, I did put an effort into ensuring that I didn't get locked up in that world and miss out on everything else that there was to offer. (Though I probably shouldnât have read all three volumes of Lord of the Rings over a two week period shortly before some year end exams!). Back to the plot. Reading that quote reminded me of what we used to say back in my Group Partner days ... "The Last Thing You Ever Need Near A Problem Is An Expert" Good. Because I am not. LinkedIN 'Labs' used to run something that visually mapped your connections so you could see clusters of people in your network. They closed it a while back, but at the time I wrote about it, dubbing it 'Cloud Hopping'. I also observed that most people had a very tight network of very few 'clouds'. This was mine.
A highly distributed interconnected network, emerging from European and American networks in finance, technology, application  and social disciplines. I think Derek was spot on. My strength is not my speciality. My strength is my generality. And, while I would absolutely not describe myself as a genius, I am definitely a cloud hopper. A connector. And there are not many of us around, or at least we tend to keep quiet, because we live in an age where value is placed on 'what you know'. The 'who you know' is almost written off as 'the old boys club' . But once you understand the value of the role that Gladwell calls out in The Tipping Point - the pieces fall into place.
My Speciality? Generality!
I first published this post on Beyond Bridges on February 10th, 2016. That site has gone, the words archived,
đĽ War, 2007 - â â â
It is what you might expect from a movie with Jason and Jet - and nothing wrong with that.
Return On Effort
"This time he was here to help us understand some truths about how we really run the business, make decisions, and value what's worth doing. When I say value, I don't mean a list of generalized "values", or the bullshit phrase of "adding value", but how we attribute value when evaluating our options and making tradeoffs."
đŹ Jason Fried
đ§ Coordination Costs
The Stripe co-founders were candid about their failure to predict where the economy was heading. They also said they overspent on things like âcoordination costs.â Thatâs not a term Iâve heard before, but I suspect it is a reflection of getting too big and too inefficient.
đŹ Jessica Lessin
It's a new term to me aswell - BUT recently on LinkedIN there was a meme running around - which used this graphic.
It's pretty self explanatory. The formula is that for every person you add to an organisation, the number of potential conversations increases - a lot. If 'n' is the number of people in an organisation, the number of potential conversations is n-1 + n-2 + n-3 .... in other words ...
3 people ... 2 + 1 = 3 4 people ... 3+2+1 = 6 5 people ... 4+3+2+1 = 10 6 people ... 5+4+3+2+1 = 15
And adding 1 person to a 10,000 person organisation adds 10,000 possible new lines of communication.