The so-so 1997 movie Addicted To Love, which starred Matthew Broderick and Meg Ryan, has many great lines of dialog. However, one scene in particular has stuck with me, because it has many interpretations, especially in marketing.

French/Turkish Actor Tchéky Karyo, who plays French Restaurateur Anton Depeux, is asked whether or not he ever misses France. His answer is a clear “non”. (I won’t quote the exact language here, as it is slightly graphic.)

Why is he not homesick? Because in France, he’s just another smoke-shrivelled, over-sexed critic. He’s like every other Frenchman (except the lovable and self-effacing Jean Reno), and therefore, he has no way to impress jaded French women.

But in America, his Frenchness is valuable currency. People eat over-priced mediocre food served in his well-decorated restaurant. His biting remarks are funny. He can seduce a woman by reading her the phone book in that accent. He has found his niche.

Going outside your area of expertise – in fact, getting as far away from it as possible – may be a way to creatively market your book in a whole new market. Everything that was once old is new again. The pendulum will always swing back. And people will always want what is farthest from their starting position.

(Photo credit: Mike Hewitt/Getty Images)

When I witness a stunning achievement like the opening ceremonies in Beijing, it’s my nature to try and figure out what I can learn from such a performance.

I would never have thought such alignment, coordination and harmony were possible. If I was asked to coordinate any portion of these games, it would have totally freaked me out. (But I think I still would have given it a shot.)

Here’s what occurs to me as I watch the ceremonies. Tell me if any of this rings true for your company…
1) I’m not delegating enough. I need to hire more help.
2) I’m not doing a good enough job of communicating my vision to assistants, and perhaps even clients. I need to use more storyboarding, video, and other illustrative techniques.
3) I don’t need to micro-manage. If I share my vision well enough, people will believe in it, and they will figure out a lot of the details on their own.
4) While clarifying my vision for others, I may discover the fastest way to clarify it for myself – by thinking in harmony with others, and less thinking about my vision all by myself.
5) I should increase my vision of my company’s reach to be more global. Language barriers are not that big a deal.
6) Foreign markets are really, really hungry for North American products. They hate us, but they want to buy our stuff. It’s weird.
7) Not everything has to be accomplished using high-tech methods. If 2008 people can jump around inside cardboard boxes and make it look like a giant plate of movable type, I can be happy using my post-it notes and white boards rather than an electronic illustration.
8) Scale is really, really impressive. But it still has to look good close-up. Details matter.
9) I have to take more risks – even though there is the possibility that something can go horribly, horribly wrong, I need to put myself out there even more. It is never enough.
and…
10) Anything is possible if it can be imagined.

Web usability is a complicated science. Designers do their best to conform to a constantly-changing array of expectations from users, with very little to guide them other than their own well-honed instinct.

Now that users can customize their experience online, designers do their best to keep all the options open for a user. The perfect example is the question of whether or not links in text, like this one, should replace what you are currently reading, like this example, or if they should open in a brand new window or tab.

There is no definitive answer. That’s why we’re asking for your input. Fill out the poll below with your answer, and see what others think. Add a comment below about the question. We’d really like to know.

(When you click on “View what others think”, you’ll be taken to an entirely new window to view the current poll results.)

Thanks for participating!

I was awoken very early this morning by my neighbour’s new rooster. (Yes, she’s still my friend.) While trying to get back to sleep, I heard another sound – a gentle rustling and footsteps in my yard, outside my bedroom window.

I crept out of bed to see a young deer and her very brand-new fawn munching on Bracken Fern in my cedar grove. This was the smallest fawn I’ve ever seen. He was very darkly spotted, and his mother was gently licking him. He couldn’t have been more than a few days old. From my vantage point, he seemed only to be about the size of a cat. I must have made some sound, because he followed her as she quickly led him out of my view.

This morning is the last time that I may get to see such a scene, because today is the day that my yard will be excavated by heavy equipment. Our newly-built house will finally nest into the garden I imagined more than 2 years ago when I first walked onto this lot. The stumps of trees that we felled to build the house and deck will be scraped clean, like everything else here. And all of that Bracken will be gone by the end of today, pushed into a large pile of organic matter that will form a berm between the front of my property and the road. 12 hours from now, the food source on my property for these deer will be eliminated.

Building and construction are a lot like writing and editing. You plan, you imagine, but when it comes to actually doing it, you are forced to make compromise after compromise. Editing a large manuscript is arduous and sometimes full of agonizing decisions about what to keep and what not to. The “manuscript” of my construction project has been awful to edit because of outside forces like weather (the market), lack of available help (sub-contractors), and a huge distraction factor on my part. (Ironically, many of my days have been spent writing instead of finishing to build a house.) And once you’ve eliminated all the crap, you must be careful not to have robbed it of all character.

Living on a gulf island means that there are weeds in every garden – plenty of them – and I’m far, far from being the only food source for these deer. In fact, I rarely see them in my yard, and they are quite fat. (More than once has my husband suggested that he wished he still had his rusty .22 in the basement.) I’m not hurting them by pulling out stumps and putting up wire fencing. And so I believe a few weeds should be left in each piece of writing, especially in non-fiction, which often serves to keep the content light and more personable.

Today I’m ripping out thistle, scraping away long grasses and raking up piles of stones. But I’m going to leave a section of grasses and ferns at the end of my driveway still wild – just for the deer. They are so sweet and gentle, and I want to make sure that my garden is going to be welcoming to creatures like that. I don’t care about the weeds – they will flower and attractively greet visitors. Who wants to pretend to be perfect, anyway?