Faraway, So Close

Up With the Static and the Radio Waves

Cancelling My Podia Account

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Earlier today I sent this email to folks on my mailing list that had purchased or expressed interest in purchasing a course I published on Podia. I’m cross-posting it to my blog just in case someone misses the email.

I’m sorry to have to do this but I’m letting you know that I’m going to be shutting down my account on Podia at the end of April, 2018. When I cancel my Podia account the content on here will be disappearing.

Why?

The main reason is that I’ve realized I’m not able to produce courses_videos and market them at the pace necessary to justify paying for a service like Podia on a monthly basis. It has nothing to do with the quality of Podia as a course_membership service – I think it’s one of the best out there if you’re looking to publish a video course, run a membership program, or both!

Spencer and the crew at Podia are doing an amazing job of taking all the pain away from creators and teachers who just want to get their thing out there in the world. Podia makes it so much easier than it used to be. Memberships, Courses, Email Newsletters, or Digital Downloads are all possible without having to worry about complicated servers and plugins and payment gateways.

What Happens to the Courses You Purchased?

The last purchase of one of my courses was in February 2018 so hopefully by now if you bought the course you’ve had a chance to work through it. As I said, the site will be active until the end of April, 2018. If you have any questions about how to access the course, please reply to this email before April 30th or send me an email at [email protected] / tweet at https://twitter.com/ichris and I can direct you to where the videos will live on on my YouTube channel.

I’m also in the process of publishing all the course videos on my YouTube channel where they’ll live on freely available to watch for as long as Google keeps YouTube around.

What About Podcasting 101 / WordPress 101?

I’d still love to put together those courses someday but I know that it’s not happening anytime soon. I’ll definitely be publishing podcasting tutorials and quick tips on my YouTube channel.

If you’d like to keep up with new videos I publish, you can sign up for my newsletter here 💌 and I’ll drop you a note whenever I put out a new video.

Listen Along

If you’d like to keep up with what I’m up to, you can listen to my podcast Daily(ish) where every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday I talk about life, work, and most everything in between in 10 minutes or less each episode.

Subscribe to my podcast:

Thank you for your time today as well as for your support in the courses I wanted to create. I’d also like to thank Podia for their help in answering any questions I had in using their site.

Chris Enns
Lemon Productions

Literally and Figuratively Out of Touch on Powder Mountain

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I have no doubt that the previous generations of rich businessmen were as out of touch as these guys, but at least they presumably had the good sense to keep their mouths shut about it.

From The Guardian, “Welcome to Powder Mountain – a utopian club for the millennial elite“:

But it was an experience on a Summit cruise ship that Chawla says made the biggest impression. He was on the deck, casually talking to the founder of a not-for-profit company whose career had been devoted “to building schools in Africa or something like that”. “I felt so embarrassed to say, ‘Oh, I run a technology company, I build apps.’ It was just so purposeless. It felt so selfish, what I was doing.” Chawla says the first thing he did when he got off the boat was set up his own (now defunct) not-for-profit company: Charity Swear Box. It was a website connected to Twitter that would monitor how often a user swears in their tweets, and recommend they make a donation to charity. “I would have never spent the time and effort to do that had I not come to Summit,” he says.

It also shows an astounding lack of self awareness around what technology is enabling for some, while completely crushing the worlds of others:

I tell Rosenthal that I’ve met many people in America who work as hard as him and his friends – harder, in fact – but struggle to make ends meet. He acknowledges that he’s benefited from considerable advantage, but insists we now live in an era in which “the internet is the great equaliser”. “What are you doing to create the utility for yourself? Are you introducing people so they can collaborate?” he says. Struggling Americans, he adds, might want to “host a dinner. Invite 10 strangers. See what happens.”

The conversation reminds me of so many I have had in and around San Francisco, in which millennials made rich through technology relay snippets of revelatory conversations they’ve had with Uber drivers, some of whom live and sleep in their cars. It is as though the taxi-sharing app is one of the last remaining cords keeping the new elites connected to everyone else’s world. When Uber rolls out its self-driving cars, even that fragile connection will be broken.

Lord, give me the confidence of a white tech dude.

Blogging in 2018 – Kottke Hits 20

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kottke.org was one of the first blogs I remember reading regularly. In this recent interview titled Last blog standing, Jason Kottke talks about how blogging compares with other options out there for writers in 2018 as his own blog turns 20:

On “the kids” and social media:

I got the feeling that if it’s not on Facebook and it’s not on Instagram, and it doesn’t involve their friends, they don’t really care that much.

​Using other membership options:

Whereas if you use Patreon, you go to Patreon.com, you’re in their experience. That’s the other thing I really didn’t like about it; I wanted to keep control over my membership experience. I didn’t want to outsource it to Patreon if in three years they do some sort of Facebook-esque thing and start hosting more and more content on their site so that it becomes more about them and less about the creators. I could just see that happening, and I didn’t want to go anywhere near it.

The blog as his job and as his life:

I never really got sick of the site. I would every once in a while, but since the membership thing happened, I really like sitting down and going to work for my members. It’s not just that it’s my job. It’s like, I want to do this for them because they have been kind enough to support me. You don’t get that feeling about having advertising on your site. It’s not the same.

​I went to grab the link for his site to write this post and the first article linked was this one on a video blogger dealing with cancer that I immediately had to watch.

Congratulations Jason on getting your “one-man-band” to Twenty.

The State of the iOS Economy

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Horace Dediu dives into numbers of the iOS economy in 2017 based off Apple’s PR release announcing a record breaking holiday season.

While the numbers are crazy high and obviously good for Apple, I wonder where all the money people are spending on apps is coming from? And what isn’t getting the money anymore now that it’s being spent on apps?

Horace Dediu:

During this year iOS users will be spending about $100 million per day for Apps.

Maybe this is part of the answer?

I’ve made comparisons before with the app business being bigger than the film industry (and much bigger than the music industry.) This was considering Android revenues and iOS combined as “app revenues”. As of this year the App Store alone will overtake Global Box Office revenues.

Scrolling through the top selling apps on the iOS App Store today, it seems like a healthy mix of lifestyle, productivity, and utility apps. The games section is a similar mix of big publishers and indie games all in the $1 – $10 range – Minecraft continues to be the top selling iOS game, which is interesting now that Microsoft owns Minecraft. 15 years ago if I’d told you that Microsoft would have the top selling game on any sort of Apple software store, you’d think I was nuts on many levels.

The top grossing charts are full of free apps that offer in-app purchase or subscription options that Apple gets a cut of: Netflix, Tinder, and Pandora are the top 3. Candy Crush Saga is #4, and YouTube rounds out the top 5. To give an idea of scale, Minecraft, the top paid app at $9.99CDN, is down at #33 on the top grossing list.

It makes me sad that a great Mac developer like Panic couldn’t make Transmit for iOS work at the scale of the App Store in 2017. There’s obviously a ton of money pouring into the App Store economy – I just hope developers don’t have to race to the bottom of the quality scale in order to make it in 2018.

Apple’s Privacy Feature Costing Ad Companies Millions

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Privacy continues to suck on the web. Luckily browser makers have finally started to take the user’s interests to heart. From The Guardian via MacStories: No tracking, no revenue: Apple’s privacy feature costs ad companies millions:

Internet advertising firms are losing hundreds of millions of dollars following the introduction of a new privacy feature from Apple that prevents users from being tracked around the web. Advertising technology firm Criteo, one of the largest in the industry, says that the Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP) feature for Safari, which holds 15% of the global browser market, is likely to cut its 2018 revenue by more than a fifth compared to projections made before ITP was announced.

I don’t have any sympathy for an industry that’s gotten tremendously rich off trying to track people on the web, whether they want it or not. It’s not like they learned their lesson when Apple first released ITP – they just tried to figure out a way around it:

Initially, many advertisers believed they had found a technological way around some of the restrictions put in place by ITP. Criteo, which took advantage of that loophole, had initially expected revenue to drop by only 9-13%, the company said. But in December, Apple closed that work-around on its mobile devices as part of the iOS 11.2 update, causing the ad-tech firm to update its projected impact to its current estimate of 22% “relative to our pre-ITP base case projections”.

A Modest Proposal

If you follow this link to my business site, I should be allowed to:

  • Know how many people visited my site via that link.
  • See what pages are popular over time on my site and using my own data on Lemon Productions extrapolate that people who come from ChrisEnns.com tend to visit these kinds of pages on Lemon Productions.
  • See how long people tend to stay on a given page on my site.

What I should not be allowed to do is then track that person when they leave my site. And then show that person ads on other sites based on the pages they visited on my site.

It’d be like going into Canadian Tire, talking to a sales person about a car battery, and then as you’re leaving the sales person slips a chip in your pocket so they can track you as you head over to Best Buy and while you’re looking at a new TV there, Canadian Tire is able to show an ad for a car battery on the TV you’re in front of. Which is going to start happening soon enough anyway.

Can’t we just go back to trying to write/create great stuff that attracts readers/watchers/listeners because it’s great and not because they were coerced, manipulated, and badgered to visit?

My Business

Lemon Productions