My old college chum David Schatsky says that Jupiter is right and I am wrong about the cookie statistic (40% of American net users delete their cookies every month, with a significant percentage doing it every day). Hey, there are some states where people don’t even brush their teeth that often.
I will happily stand corrected if Jupiter is that sure of the data. What’s fascinating though is that among all the mail I got from my sophisticated reader base, not one person wrote in to tell me she deletes her cookies daily.
Jeff Jarvis (BuzzMachine … by Jeff Jarvis) thought it might be automated software that’s automatically doing the work. One writer (nameless) thinks it’s people covering their porn tracks. I think it might be survey design and people saying they do something they don’t really do.
Link: David Schatsky: Cookie Grumbling.
March 15, 2005
means friend of a friend.
Link: Social networks: All around the Net, but underused by news sites.
This is such a loaded expression. It starts with "friend". Not a formal relationship, but a tenuous one. And a relationship that doesn’t belong to you! The friendship is between your friend and her friend.
The very idea of utilizing a FOAF network for your own gain is scary. Scarier still is allowing your FOAF network to be used by someone else to make a profit.
There are firms sprouting up every day promising big companies that they will do just that. That they’ll organize and exploit FOAF networks to product big profits for corporations. It might work for a little while, but not for long.
The reason is the tenuous nature of the friendships. The fourth person in the chain (marketer, you, your friend, your friend’s friend) is awfully low on the totem pole.
So what works? Two things:
1. Smooth, simplify and formalize the process of spreading the idea so if an idea is worth spreading, it’ll run into less friction. The white headphones on the iPod, for example, amplify the message of the player even when someone can’t see it.
2. Make stuff that people want to spread even if they don’t care about you. The Republicans definitely got this right during the last election cycle.
I’ve gotten more mail about my MBA post than any in weeks and weeks. And all the mail says the same thing:
"What are the 30 books?"
I’ve got three answers. Here’s the first one:
There aren’t 30 books. There is no tiny canon of the essential books, that once read, will transform you into Warren Buffet or Mark Cuban. There are 300 books, though, and choosing an appropriate variety from the 300 will work just fine.
The point of my post was that the knowledge required is pretty small. The will is hard to find, of course, but you don’t find will at business school.
Over the next week or two, I’ll try to give an answer that some of you may find more satisfying.
So, for 119 Harvard MBA students, the phone rings. "Buddy, you’re not going to be admitted to the MBA program because you decoded a poorly written website and found out your admissions status too soon." [This means, of course, that for the next two years, you don’t have to pay Harvard more than $150,000 in room and board and lost wages, and you can build your own business or join a non-profit or run for the Senate].
So what’s the bad news?
Plenty of handwringing about the ethics or lack thereof in this case (the media loves the turmoil) but I think a more interesting discussion is what a gift these 119 people got. An MBA has become a two-part time machine. First, the students are taught everything they need to know to manage a company from 1990, and second, they are taken out of the real world for two years while the rest of us race as fast as we possibly can.
I get away with this heresy since I, in fact, have my own fancy MBA from Stanford. The fact is, though, that unless you want to be a consultant or an i-banker (where a top MBA is nothing but a screen for admission) it’s hard for me to understand why this is a better use of time and money than actual experience combined with a dedicated reading of 30 or 40 books.
If this is an extension of a liberal arts education, with learning for learning’s sake, I’m all for it. If, on the other hand, it’s a cost-effective vocational program, I don’t get it.
Yes, I know what the Black Scholes equation is. No, I don’t understand it. And no, I don’t need it. Do you?
Link: PCWorld.com – Harvard Rejects Applicants Who Hacked Site.
March 14, 2005
Who is this woman? Does she work at Sales Genie? Is she a customer? Does her excellent hairstyle and tailored suit have anything to do with the quality of these mailing lists?
Of course stuff like this works. Of course it’s a lie. It’s something that customers (of both genders, apparently) respond to.
IF a computer can do it
AND someone can make money from it
AND they can do it anonymously
THEN it’s pretty clear it’s going to happen, even if it ruins a good thing for the rest of us.
Blog growth is accelerating. It’s now doubling every five months or so, with 30,000 new blogs coming every single day.
Except that’s not really good news, because a whole bunch of those blogs are being created with computers automated to spew out countless brainless blogs.
Here’s how it works: you create a program that develops hundreds or even thousands of blogs, all of which are busy referring to each other and to your products. Soon, you start showing up on automated services like google or technorati. You get more than your fair share of traffic.
Hey, it’s not against the law.
But yeah, it’s selfish and it denigrates a valuable resource that the rest of us depend on.
One more time, I’ll say it clearly: anonymity is bad for the net. Wouldn’t you like a switch that would prevent all anonymous email from showing up in your inbox? Or a similar switch in google, which would filter out anonymous trash sites? The Wikipedia would work even better if all its contributors were maskless.
Link: Seth’s Blog: The problem with anonymous (part VII).
Link: Fast Company | Change Agent — Issue 51.
Thanks to David Sifry for working so hard on the spam issue and for the incredible service technorati performs. Check out his blog for more on the rapid creation of new blogs: Sifry’s Alerts.
Jupiter just published a report that says that 10% of US Net users delete the cookies on their web browser every day and 40% do it (in aggregate) every month.
Let’s do a reality check here. This is the same population that can’t get rid of pop ups, repeatedly falls for phishing of their Paypal and eBay accounts, still uses Internet Explorer, buys stuff from spammers, doesn’t know what RSS is and sends me notes every day that say, "what’s a blog?"
Forgive my skepticism, but it’s inconceivable to me that 40% of the audience knows how to use their browser to erase their cookies.
The echo chamber effect on the Net is stronger than it is anywhere in the world. Yes, professional women in New York think that lots of women keep their maiden name when they get married (it’s actually less than 5%). Yes, people who work out all the time figure that most people do (they don’t.). People who run wineries figure that lots of people care about wine (they don’t.) But on the Net it is at its worst. The heavy users figure that everyone understands what we understand. (They don’t.)
My favorite bit of proof: One of the top 100 things searched for on Yahoo! was "Yahoo". Also on the list when I was there: "web" and "search".
People aren’t stupid. They just are too busy or too distracted to care as much as you do about the stuff you care about.
Link: Study: Consumers Delete Cookies at Surprising Rate.
I ended my book Purple Cow with the admonition that "very good is bad." A few folks were confused by this, but a post on John Battelle’s Searchblog reminded of my point… it’s worth another look.
become.com is the brainchild of some of the founders of MySimon and other shopping sites. It is supposed to be the next big thing, a google-killer.
Become is very good. A quick bunch of searches demonstrates that it’s a totally fine alternative to Froogle or some other shopping engines.
But there’s no way in the world people are going to switch.
Customers don’t switch for very good. What they’ve got is already very good! Google wasn’t a very good alternative to Yahoo. It was something far bigger than that.
The only way to beat Google or Kodak or Fotomat or McKinsey or JetBlue or you name it is to be over-the-top better, to be remarkable, to change the game.
It’s a great time to be a consumer. And it’s harder than it’s ever been to create stuff worth switching for.
March 13, 2005
Rob Walker has a great piece in this weekend’s Times magazine