Sixian

There are two types of indie consultants. There are those that have created a very clear specialization, you can look at their website and see something like “I help B2B SaaS companies with their content strategy” or “I help brands build audience via email”...Then there are those who are… weirder, less legible, harder to define. Folks who’s website... See more

Playbooks for creating viral products

1.  Novelty/Entertainment


2. Instrumented

You can't do it. You can't collapse these categorizations without some signal loss. The problem is, because the cataloguers assume their classification should have force on the world, they underestimate the difficulty of understanding what users are thinking, and they overestimate the amount to which users will agree, either with one another or... See more

A quick example from my life: Twitter didn’t replace Facebook. The iPad didn’t replace my phone. My phone didn’t replace my TV. Now, I watch YouTube on my iPad, toss the video up to my TV, while checking Twitter and Facebook on my phone. It’s a little constellation of technology. But I keep asking myself: how many more things can I juggle? And for... See more

Illegibility comes from complexity without clarity. I believe that the legibility of the source is one of the most important properties of the web. It’s the main thing that keeps the door open to independent, unmediated contributions to the network. If you can write markup, you don’t need Medium or Twitter or Instagram (though they’re nice to... See more

From the late '90s to mid-teens to mid-2010s, the industry was in decline, partly because of this ripping issue coming to the fore, but partly because they weren't offering the consumer a product they wanted that was increasingly becoming digital in the consumers buying, but not so much digital in the industry's mind.The first attempt by the... See more

One is it was trying to solve a consumer problem with the industry and then two, is technology was enabling this digital consumption of music and the industry just was not forward on that. iTunes was a reaction, if you will, to the ripping services, whereas you could have argued actually it should have been what drove the consumer to the digital... See more

Modern epistemologies are forward-facing; they centralize the knower. And they often thrive on what some philosophers would call representation nihilism. That is, the presumption that the world is outside, external. And our work is to adequately represent it, right? In our ideas, in our language, and our concepts, to bring it in, so to speak, to... See more

People have been freaking out about the virtuality of data for decades, and you'd think we'd have internalized the obvious truth: there is no shelf. In the digital world, there is no physical constraint that's forcing this kind of organization on us any longer. We can do without it, and you'd think we'd have learned that lesson by now.