⬅️ Fudge Factor 🧭 Finding My Niche ➡️
Increasingly Connected
This week is a look at my next newsletter on our increasingly connected world.
Getting Informed
Each week I think about topics to cover in my weekly newsletter. My daily newsletter is a bit more structured and topical.
Last week I determined that I would find my newsletter niche. The domain where telecom, cloud, and A.I. are meeting, colliding, and converging is probably going to be where I take my next newsletter.
Controls
Getting the branding right is just as important as the content. Also, making a place for a podcast is interesting to consider.
At the same time, beyond newsletters, I would like to blog again in addition to my use of Mastodon as a sort of microblog. Ultimately, as long as I can stick to my POSSE approach with heavy automation, this is a sustainable level of effort.
What if scenarios
After catching up with a few industry peers about what they would want to read, a common question kept coming up again and again. Would I consider becoming an industry analyst at one of the larger analyst groups?
The short answer is that it depends. The short answer is not much of an answer, but it is very flattering to think that others see me as an analyst.
My prior span of continuous independent consulting was in the late 2000s before VCE turned into a decade of my career timeline. As of this update, I am 108 days into my latest fractional executive journey — we shall see.
However, if you consider analysts turned writers like Ben Thompson of Stratechery and Benedict Evans, perhaps the analyst angle is a thread for me to pull on a bit more. As of this update, I think my niche may not be topical but, instead, my niche will be conceptual.
Fudge it til you make it
As concepts go, I’ve written before about the future of telecom. My formative career years were in telecom which is also known as information and communication technology (ICT).
Lately, I’ve been thinking about the generations of ICT, and how access to computing continues towards greater ubiquity. At the same time, the attributes for each ICT generation are typically built upon the prior generation.
| ICT Generation | Attributes |
|---|---|
| Analog 📞 | Early telecom |
| Digital ☎️ | Onramp to the early Internet |
| Broadband 🖥️ | Wider access to faster Internet |
| Mobile 📶 | Cellular devices with computing capability |
| Connected 🛜 | Physical things and systems online |
| Networked 📊 | Interlinked sharing of data |
| Cloud ☁️ | Lower friction access to computing |
| IoT/IIoT 🏭 | Cloud connected objects |
| Ubiquitous 🌎 | Always available services |
| Pervasive 🗺️ | Exhaustive accessibility to computing |
| Ambient 👻 | Invisible computing |
| Seamless 🟢 | Untethered computing |
| Immersive 👓 | Augmented environments |
| Quantum 🔮 | Instant secure communication |
This non-exhaustive chart is where I will start. Maybe I’ll make a Wardley map and incorporate the visual into a YouTube video podcast overlay in OBS.
The last ICT generations in the list are my conceptual target. ICT Generations are going to be meeting, colliding, and converging.
When I think of just a sample of what I am reading, I have favorites – and I used to write for one of my favorites many years ago. I grabbed the top of my reading folder to make observations from the results.
Specifically, when I look at these websites, I see timed topical content across multiple domains, targeted advertising, sponsored content, white papers, reports, and enviable stacks of gated content. That approach to sponsored content is one I’ve been considering and the advertising is an experiment I’ve tried in the past but gated content would be interesting too.
Being notable enough for advertising attention is to have one or more attributes relating to traffic and readership. Claims to these attributes are usually found on the “About” page or similar for these websites.
- Millions of unique users
- Millions of page views
- Thousands of subscribers
- Segmentation of the subscribers
- Metadata for the subscribers
There is also a growing consolidation of integrated B2B media companies and the analysts within. Yet, to be consolidated appears to require building an audience (with attractive attributes) and a content backlog of value.
That’s all for now. I’ll be thinking about naming and branding for next month but I am leaning towards Fudge Factor or Fudge Forward.
Disclosure
I am linking to my disclosure.
