March 2008
The Archives
-
03.31.08The Web’s own Letter to the EditorIn my binary world, you can read blogs in two ways: For the content For the author Both of these ways are valuable. But one is much more important. A search on The Google will land you some great content. It's standard is to find the most relevant results and it does a pretty good job. This makes search an amazing opportunity for people who know how to create great content. Top-notch, relevant content will bring loads of search-driven traffic which can be monetized by text ads. This ...
-
03.31.08You can even sell trashInteresting story from NPR that proves people will buy anything. During a MTV summer internship, Justin Gignac argued with an colleague that packaging was critical to product's success. So, to prove his point, he tried to sell garbage in a cleaver package. He was so successful that he had to increase the price to curb demand from $10 to $50 dollars for a single 3" by 3" cube of trash. After 1000 cubes sold to people in 25 countries, he understandably feels vindicated. A good reminder that packaging creates value. Makes me wonder when he ...
-
03.24.08Thoughts at 30KOn a flight, and it's a good time to think: 1) Why is capitalism great? Because. it allow each individual to define success. Each person can say, "this. specific thing is what I care about, this is where I want to focus" and no one can argue. I am learning that a large organization can be the same way. 2) I am going to start a blog series on why blogging is important. Topics. will range from: why blogging helps everyone (even those who ...
-
03.19.08A substitute for natural language searchHitWise is reporting 118% year-over-year growth for question and answer sites like the category leader Yahoo Answers. The report lacks any sort of referral statistics -- like where the traffic is originating -- but I have the theory that it's coming from people continuing to ask search engines questions rather than Q&A sites. Returning traffic appears quite low. Yahoo has the most impressive results with about 50% of it's traffic from returning users (does this mean returning Yahoo! members, or just Y! Answer users?) but other sites in the report are heavily lop-sided averaging only ~15% of users returning. ...
-
03.10.08BlogTalkRadio’s highs and lowsI'm looking to play around with Cinch tonight. It's a service from BlogTalkRadio that I learned about from Dave Winer. He calls it "the simplest podcast API ever." It is literally atomic in what it does: call (646) 200-0000, record your voice message, and pick up your feed at http://cinch.blogtalkradio.com/. No registration, no account... just a free phone-to-podcast API. Be sure to read Dave's post; the comments bring up the relevant concerns of security and originality. I read/watch Alpha Trends so when a search for BTR returned a hit from the blog, I followed the link. ...
-
03.07.08Engineers in search of stabilityThe WSJ has a story - albeit very anecdotal - on the sobering effects of economic downturns on the start-up dreams of tech engineers. Software developers who flocked to (potentially) IPO-bound ventures during the boom times of the late 1990's and early 2000's are reportedly looking for safe havens in firms holding more capital. The exodus from risk to stability has left the blue chip-heavy East Coast sitting pretty to attract top-notch talent: In January, the unemployment rate in Silicon Valley's metropolitan areas of San Jose, Sunnyvale and Santa Clara rose to 5.3% from 4.8% ...
-
03.05.08The truth about the compass roseI just started a new book The Whale Warriors (I will link when I'm off the BlackBerry). The introduction includes a map of the South Pole. There is a note regarding the compass rose that is included: From the South Pole every line of longitude runs true north. In other words, when you are on the Pole there is only one direction, no matter which way you face: North. The opposite is true for the North Pole. Never seen this thought in words before -- there are two places on the globe where the compass is meaningless. ...
-
03.04.08Hacking Google Reader no moreGoogle Reader quietly added another feature that further cements itself as my preferred feed reader. The GR team has implemented a drop-and-drag interface that allows me to reorder my tags. I've wanted this feature for a while. As you can see, I have hacked around this deficiency for a while, exploiting the alphabetical order algorithm and naming things with an underscore like "_must_see" or simply using tags that I know will hit the top of the list such as "a". Glad to see the team put some developmental bandwidth to this much needed feature.
recent posts
- The Wallstrip Edge [Book Terser]
- How to name your own price
- Keep your worthless predictions
- The Definitive Book of Body Language [Book Terser]
- Terse Reviews
- Flatten; because users are lazy.
- P(recession) = 1, P(American is shopper) = 1
twitter.com/dougwtwitter.com/dougw -
Contact Doug Williams
