The neatest blog invention of the week: a persistent blog entry that stays right on top of your blog.
All the data I can see makes it clear that most blogs don’t just have a loyal RSS following. People show up in the middle. They miss a month or a year and then they come back.
And since this is the web, they’re impatient. Impatient people don’t sit still and grok the whole page, check out the archives and figure out what’s up. They read a sentence or two and then leave.
So, working with my friend Red at Silkblogs.com, we built just such a feature.
You can find it here:
Seth Godin – Liar’s Blog.
My plan is to change this peristent blog entry over time, adding, for example, a link to the top 10 posts–once I have more than ten.
If you like it, let the folks at Typepad know. Maybe they’ll add it.
March 12, 2005
Perhaps they should have.
When Monty Python’s Broadway production of Spamalot has a security leak and exposes 19,000 email addresses (get it… spam a lot…) it’s sort of funny. When it’s your business, probably not.
I’m on the list, the question is, how will I be able to tell the Python spam from the other spam? Too existential for me.
Link: The New York Times > Theater > News & Features > What to Expect of ‘Spamalot’? A Lot of Spam.
Whenever you try to take a prospect or a customer or a student or an employee through a process, you run the risk of losing them. Sometimes just a few out of a hundred drop out along the way. You lose a few at every step. Sometimes, though, it’s a much bigger number.
Too often, we forget to to measure to discover the wall, the one step in the process that nails a huge portion of the population. Maybe, if we left that step out, we’d get a little bit less, but we’d get it from a whole bunch more people.
I was registering an Apple product while the software was installing. I made it to step five, and they wanted to know not just the kind of product, but the "Marketing part number."
I bailed.
The benefits of being registered (dubious at best) were overwhelmed by the hassle of finding out this number. Bye.
Now the marketing gurus at Apple get no data instead of most of the data. My bet is that this is a wall, a place where a huge percentage of people abandon the process.
The same thing happens when people learn trigonometry or apply to your firm for a job or decide whether or not to read about your new products.
March 11, 2005
The only kind of lie that’s easier than a numbers lie is a lie with pictures. Here’s an ad that manages to do both.
Read about it here:
Automaker vs. the People: UCS ad response to Automakers
This is a very popular brand of “soy sauce” for take out chinese restaurants in New York. It’s made not far from my house in White Plains, NY.
The thing is, there’s no soy sauce in it. The ingredients state that it contains water and salt and coloring and “hydrolyzed soy protein.” That, ladies and gentlemen, isn’t soy sauce.
So, why, after paying rent, importing chefs, going shopping, putting up the signs, printing all those menus, cutting all those vegetables, cooking everything and then serving it in clever but expensive take out containers would a restaurant decide to save a penny (and the savings can’t be more than a penny) serving fake soy sauce?
Does the brown color make diners feel like they’re eating something more Chinese than ordinary table salt would? Undoubtedly.
George Atkinson, the founder of the first videostore, just died.
All he did was buy a few videocassettes and a one inch ad in the Los Angeles Times. That and he followed through and persisted and relentlessly changed one multi-billion dollar industry while inventing another.
He didn’t need access to capital or a crystal ball or a fancy network. He just did it.
Could you have done the same thing?
There are 5 million, ten million, a billion blogs.
What are they saying about issues you care about?
What are they saying about you?
Here’s a simple two step way to find out and keep finding out.
Step 1: Visit: Technorati: What’s happening on the Web right now.
At the top, type in your name or your brand or your issue, probably in quotes.
After you do a search, choose to make it a Watchlist.
Technorati asks you to register (it’s free), and then gives you an RSS feed.
Copy that and go over to: Bloglines | My Feeds.
If you’re not a member, you should join.
Now, add the thing you just copied out of technorati and boom, it’s being watched for you.
Every time you go back to bloglines, you can see the latest news about your issues and your brands (and your name), from millions of other sites. For free.
Hey, who invented this Internet thing, anyway?
PS, while you’re over at Bloglines, paste this in:
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/index.rdf
It will give you an automatic update of this blog.
You can also get my Liar’s Blog automatically updated by pasting this in:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/SethGodin-LiarsBlog
Darren Barefoot reveals the most photographed cities (on a per capita basis, as posted on Flickr). Vancouver is on the list because that’s where Flickr started. The rest are each explained in their own way (Amsterdam and Vegas are photogenic, New York has too many people who don’t own digital cameras), and the list has no predictive power whatsoever (try to guess the next one in the series… answer on Darren’s site).
Just because you have access to data doesn’t mean that it’s helpful. More often than not, it (the data, or lack thereof) is just justification to do nothing about truly pressing issues.
Vancouver – 7.94
Amsterdam – 4.69
Las Vegas – 4.03
Seattle – 3.80
San Francisco – 3.16
London – 2.76
Barcelona – 1.99
Sydney – 1.83
Toronto – 1.32
Chicago – 1.31
New York – 1.13
Los Angeles – 0.62
Link: The Most Photographed City on Flickr | Darren Barefoot.
Link: Eyetrack III – What You Most Need to Know
This is good stuff.
Thanks to Kpaul for the link.
March 10, 2005
So, you’ve decided to go spend a few thousand dollars on clothes. You’re a little heavier than you were last year (it was a rough Christmas) but you’d rather not be reminded of that.
No problem!
One would think that clothes sizing would be a fairly standard system. It’s not. Over the years, as our population has –ahem– expanded, sizes have as well. A women’s size 6 is a lot bigger than it used to be (and a Junior Women’s 3x is hardly junior).
As a result, the shopper can tell herself a lie… a story about both looking good and feeling good. And that’s the whole point of clothes shopping, isn’t it? We don’t need a new outfit, we want one. And shopping for expensive clothes is all about changing the way the shopper feels.
