If you’re interested in the new tools, techniques and approaches available for kitting up a blog, I can’t strongly enough recommend Fred Wilson’s blog: A VC. Over the last year, in addition to writing really compelling pieces about the web and business, Fred has turned his blog into a public lab. He tests things so you don’t have to.
Even if you have no desire to start a company or go public one day, you’ll learn something.
So, why does Hugh have so much traffic? Consider this thought from an interview we just did: It’s so easy for a blogger to try to be like other bloggers, merely because there’s so much input available. Resist!
Michael points us to: BBC NEWS | Business | ‘Product sabotage’ helps consumers. I don’t buy the sabatoge part, not at all, but it’s interesting to see how the BBC outed Starbucks on one of their "secret" menu items. (thanks, John, for the Slate link.)
Link: Cows ‘moo’ with an accent, farmers believe
"I think it works the same as with dogs – the closer a farmer’s bond is with his animals, the easier it is for them to pick up his accent."
Well of course they do. Accents are more than localized vowel sounds… they represent the way any group localizes its behavior. That means that bankers have a regional "accent" in the way they do business, and so do stamp collectors. The closer an organization gets to its regional customers, the more likely it is to understand the local dialect.
Darren Rowse is at the cusp of a trend: The Problogger Job Board – Helping Bloggers find jobs. And you can even subscribe by RSS…
I just had some great windsurfing lessons (no, that’s not me–the only thing I had in common with this guy is that we were both upside down). I can tell you that windsurfing is very easy… except for the wind.
The wind makes it tricky, of course. It’s not particularly difficult to find and rent great equipment, and the techniques are fairly straightforward. What messes the whole plan up is the fact that the wind is unpredictable. It’ll change exactly when you don’t want it to.
Just the other day I read a riff that reminded me that the same thing is true about customer service (it would be a lot easier if it weren’t for the customers). Then I realized that every single function of an organization has a wind problem.
Accounting would be easy if every incoming report was accurate and on time. Sales would be easy if it weren’t for the prospects not buying from you all the time. Marketing would be easy if every prospect and customer thought the way you do…
Here’s the good news: the fact that it’s difficult and unpredictable is the best thing that’s happened to you all day. Because if it were any other way, there’d be no profit in it. The reason people bother to go windsurfing is that the challenge makes it interesting. The driving force that gets people to pay a specialist is because their disease is unpredictable or hard to diagnose. The reason we’re here is to solve the hard problems.
The next time you’re tempted to vilify a particularly obnoxious customer or agency or search engine, realize that this failed interaction is the best thing that’s happened to you all day long. Without them, you’d be easily replaceable.
So, just about everything that can be improved, is being improved. If you define "improved" to mean more features, more buttons, more choices, more power, more cost.
The washing machine I used this morning had more than 125 different combinations of ways to do the wash… don’t get me started about the dryer. Clearly, an arms race is a good way to encourage people to upgrade.
I wonder, though, if "good enough" might be the next big idea. Audio players, cars, dryers, accounting… not the best ever made, not the most complicated and certainly not the most energy-consuming. Just good enough.
For some people, a clean towel is a clean towel.
I did an interview with Mark Ramsey about the future of radio. Here’s a little squib about the four ways I think the medium might go:
Scenario A: Everyone has Wi-Fi or WiMAX in their car. Once that happens, we’re not talking about 200 XM radio stations, we’re talking about 2 million, and all bets are off.
Scenario B: The aftermarket people get very focused on putting hard drives and iPod docks in cars. If that happens, again, radio is in trouble, because people are gonna bring their own pre- recorded content with them.
Scenario C: We end up in the satellite world, they figure out how to get a little bit more content through those pipes and we end up with 300 or 400 channels in the car. I had XM radio for a year to check it out. What’s interesting is it doesn’t matter how many stations there are, sooner or later you end up with four. And so the thing is, what do you have to do to be one of the four, and how do you live in a world where you’ve got hundreds of competitors a click away, but if you spend all your time not offending anybody, you’ll never get anybody.
Scenario D: A hybrid of what we’ve got now: Traditional analog radio combined with HD combined with satellite. This scenario will, I think, not make anybody particularly happy, because the advertisers are going to be faced with an increasingly splintered audience that’s hard to address, and as a result, it will be hard for that local car dealership or that politician to do a sensible radio buy.
The idea of radio… audio determined by an external editor… isn’t going away any time soon. People like it.
The Mainstream Media was enthralled by the Snakes on a Plane story. Here, at last, was proof positive that the internet changes everything… hey, it even changes movies!
Hollywood was scared, of course, but they usually are. They understand, finally, how to use TV, and now, all of a sudden, something new to worry about.
So the glee from all sides when SOAP took a hit (only $15 mm for a b movie in late August at the box office) was palpable. People were puzzled. One pundit said it teaches Hollywood just that the Net is a good place to run ads.
I fear that people are missing a fundamental truth: just because people know who you are doesn’t mean they’re going to buy what you sell.
There’s a difference between infamy (or celebrity) and the consumer’s desire to buy.
I knew all about SOAP and had no desire whatsoever to go. I’m just not ready to sit in a theatre with a bunch of people afraid of airplanes.
I’m afraid we come back to something that marketers have been struggling with for a really long time–the best way to succeed is to have a really great product.
Analytics says that my blog is getting more first-time traffic than usual. Hence this link: …about Seth Godin. Thanks for visiting.
