Q: What do you do on a day-to-day basis?
A: I split my time in three ways. One-third of my time is spent doing professional speaking and training. I travel and give workshops. Another third, I’m doing management and strategic consulting, with my own company, Intuitive Systems. That’s mostly helping companies figure out how to get involved with the blog osphere, how to do effective podcasts, whether they should be on MySpace, and if so, what they should do and how they can engage that community. The third piece is that I run my own empire. I get about 1 million visitors a month to www.askdavetaylor.com, and that makes it a substantial media property.
I spend a fair amount of time on the back end, interacting with people one-on-one helping them with problems. And trying to write specific tutorials and things. My wife and I have a parenting blog on actually being parents, www.apparenting.com. That’s the most personal … where I talk about the trips we take and the challenges we face as parents.
Q: For your askdavetaylor.com blog, do you know the answers to readers’ questions or spend a great deal of time researching?
A: It’s a mix. What I find, as someone that has been using computer for many years, there’s a bad habit of people that are technologically savvy to assume that the people that aren’t are just stupid. So there’s very little instructional help for people.
There’s the 21st-century thinking that people are embarrassed that their children know more about computers than they do, or they don’t even use a computer. A lot of executives don’t use computers because they don’t want to look like they’re stupid.
The fact is, computers are extraordinarily complex machines. It’s not well designed; things fail all the time.
Q: Why do so many people still need computer help today?
A: It’s classic to use the online help to look for something and never find it. I try to serve as the intermediary or translator. A lot of the questions I get are really basic questions. … I got an iPod, how do I put music on it? It’s the kind of thing where anyone from Apple would roll their eyes and say, “Duh, you use iTunes.” But people don’t have insight to that, so that’s a legitimate question. It’s a legitimate service to people to help them understand that these are the basic steps you take.
Q: Why isn’t technology easier to use?
A: It’s a huge problem. People get left on the sidelines because everyone wants to do the latest, most sophisticated and most complicated, and doesn’t want to take the time to figure out all this stuff. I think it’s a huge disservice of the industry, in terms of happy widespread adoption. I think a lot of people just grit their teeth and survive with their computers.
I think in a very real way we have many teeny, tiny technological islands in a huge sea of confusion. The companies that are trying to help are sort of half-hearted about it. You look at Micro soft, and their tutorials about how to do things in Windows is written in incredibly arcane jargon and is incredibly confusing for people just starting out.
It’s a classic business challenge. Like if you’re a restaurant, you can have all the repeat customers in the world but you have to pay attention to bringing some new people in because you have to think about replenishing and adding new customers.
Q: How tech savvy are your kids?
A: They are 10, 7 and 3 years old. They don’t touch computers, don’t watch TV or videos. They run around and play. They are healthy and not overweight and have active imaginations. They’re not sullen little kids stuck in their GameBoys.
Q: What do you tell them when they see you using the computer?
A: I tell them it’s my job. My 10-year-old uses a computer occasionally. My wife uses the computer for e-mail. She writes e-mails to her cousins. I’m not interested in my kids getting involved in computers. I basically never touched a computer until I got into college, and it definitely has not hurt me. I think a lot of parents are anxious that their 4-year-olds need to have good mousing skills. The fact is, that is so second- nature, especially to modern children. I think you can defer that for a very long time without any ill effect.
Q: What’s next for you?
A: My main focus this year and next year is to master the work/life balance. Quite literally, I spend 25 percent of time on holiday. Can I build a business where I don’t have to be there every minute of every day? So far this year, we spent three weeks in Hawaii and took a cruise to Mexico. We’re a very mobile family.
Edited for clarity by staff writer Kimberly S. Johnson.
