Ken Yarmosh has a great post about making the web safe for non-techies. He sends his friend Steve to Squidoo to learn about RSS and discovers that Steve has built some great lenses in no time.
The irony? Well, next to Ken’s great post was some gibberish code about an error loading the sidebar.
A lot of us are running as fast as we can to build something swifter, cooler and web2.0er than what’s out there. The web keeps getting better, and the web is always always broken.
Sometimes, it’s worth a reminder to those of us trying to build stuff that we need to clean up and smooth out the edges for the rest of us.
March 20, 2006
…is how handmade it all is. Handmade box, handmade label, even the little cocoa morsels appear handmade.
The story is clear.
It’s authentic. The story is true.
But it’s also imperfect. The temptation is to be perfect. It’s often worth avoiding.
Ernie blogs about a new kind of advertising: erniesblog: Thermos Advertising.
Squidoo launched a Firefox extension last week. After just a few days, the numbers are already extraordinary.
Giving surfers the chance to interact with your business or organization directly from the toolbar of their browser is a huge opportunity. Anything from searching your real estate inventory to bookmarking sites back to your blog. Yes, it’s technical, but yes, it’s worth it.
…goes to the Port Authority of NY & NJ.
Now, stupid is a juvenile word, one that implies a certain lack of vocabulary on the part of the person using it. In this post, I’m using stupid to mean, "senseless waste of time and money, clearly demonstrating little thought and making it likely that people will make bad decisions."
I have little respect for much of what happens at the unaccountable Port Authority, so this is par for the course. Here’s the deal:
Leaving JFK, the helpful parking attendant at the cash register handed me an envelope that says, "Airport Parking Concept Survey". Inside are 23 questions (including income, where were you before you left for this trip and how many people did you fly with). Only five of the questions had to do with the topic at hand, which was, [summarizing]: if we built a valet parking facility, would you use it?
Why so stupid? Why worth posting about? Because it commited several survey sins, all at once:
- self-selection. The only people who would bother to fill this out are the ones in favor. Why would anyone opposed bother?
- fake census. They don’t run surveys all that often at JFK, so there’s no way to know if a 1% (or a 10%) response rate is any good.
- too much data (part 1): by asking all sorts of irrelevant questions, they depress response rate.
- too much data (part 2): by collecting all sorts of data (probably represented to three decimal points in the summary) they make the survey look a lot more accurate than it is.
- will know it when I see it: the biggest mistake, of course, is that no one knows if they’ll use something like this in two years… it’s too abstract to commit to.
"Why," a friend asks, "is it a bad idea for them to ask for feedback?" My answer is that they’re not going to use the feedback because they actually want it, but because they intend to use it to sell the idea to others. They’ll pick the data they like, make it seem quite significant and accurate, and it include it in a report. It’ll tell a story. Which is why they are wasting their money (and our time) with a survey that doesn’t do what a survey ought to do.
March 19, 2006
Just got my monthly issue of Relix magazine. It comes with a free CD, about a dozen songs from bands ranging from Frank Zappa to Keller Williams.
Each band gets exactly one song as a showcase.
So, the question: should you put your best song on the free CD?
If it’s your best song, and it’s free, then no one will pay to get it from iTunes. And if it’s the best song on the album, maybe no one will buy the album since they already have the song.
It’s easy to argue that you should hold back the best song, make people pay for that.
Until you realize that the >>> button on my CD player works great.
So, eight beats into your "not really my best song because, hey, it’s free", I skip you and you are gone forever.
hint: this riff applies to a lot more than just the music business.
Stories we tell ourselves in a blink. Video: THE PR MACHINE™ BETA PROJECT (MEDIA 2.0). [site has been down, sorry].
Joe points us to this article–a company is suing Google because their pagerank ranking in Google’s results is too low.
Perhaps the same strategy could be used on consumers who don’t want to watch your commercials…
Here’s a great way.
When someone is filling their online cart, they have a certain posture. It’s exciting and fun and all upside.
However, when you want them to shift gears and actually pay you, their posture has to change.
One way to force that change is to scold them and refuse to let them proceed. I bet you can do better.
March 17, 2006
I want to clarify the two posts below, because my email confirms that they were too sketchy and easily misunderstood.
First, Pythagorus. He was one of the greatest mathematicians of all time, and even had a little cult going for a while. A portion of his time was spent doing things that stood the test of time and were both interesting and useful. He also spent time working on reincarnation and deciding that no one in his cult should eat beans (it’s not totally clear why).
The reason I picked perfect numbers as an example is that while his point is correct (28 is in fact perfect) and while it ultimately led to figuring out prime numbers, a perfect number wasn’t nearly as important as he thought it was. It has no spiritual implications, no personality, for example. SO, to make a short story too long, I was making the point that you can never be quite sure which thing on your development agenda is the right one (your hard work might turn out to be beans) and that falling in love with your current work might not be so smart.
As far as the fungus woman, I wasn’t dissing her. I was merely pointing out that many people are quite happy living their lives on a different part of Rogers’ adoption curve than you are. She likes being the last person in her group to try something weird. It’s worth remembering the fungus when you can’t figure out why everyone on earth doesn’t love your new idea the minute you release it.
I’m getting on a plane and flying to sea level now. I promise to be more coherent soon.
March 16, 2006
