You must run over and check out Kelly and her partner Pomme. [Quick, put Kelly in a movie with George Clooney.]
They’re competing in Googleidol. And they have 8,000 more votes than the competition.
8,000. Votes.
Not 8,000 viewers. Tell me again why Kelly and her bazillion friends are going to be watching your ads any time soon?
a transparent lens cap for video cameras and SLRs that says "take off the lens cap."
Obviously, an OEM item, not an aftermarket thing. Other than tradition, is there any reason they’re black?
While we’re at it, have you ever noticed how often people leave the stickers on their digital cameras? The ones that brag about resolution and stuff… The stickers first got on them because even though only one out of a 100 cameras are opened in the store and put on display, it was worth prettying up every camera with a display sticker just in case.
But now, the sticker lives on, marketing the camera to every person who sees it. I had my picture taken by a Sony camera the other day and the logo was so big I can still picture it.
Andy Monfried wants to know: The Tradeoff
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.
…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:
"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.
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].
