A blog about new media, advertising & c. by Mark Neigh.
Created by markn on Jun 9, 2008
Last updated: 03/12/10 at 03:44 AM
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One insight Neilsen missed in his great post on reducing bounce rates is the fact that if your site provides content that answers a question you are very likely to see a high bounce rate as users are simply looking to answer a question and be on their way.A very nice service to provide.
http://www.markneigh.com/post/40589273
“Making a microsite or game does you no good if there’s no method—emails, blogs, press, ads, anything else—for consumers to find it, experience it, or link to it.” - Danny G, Interactive Agencies and Passive Mentalities
http://www.markneigh.com/post/40587582
No, they shouldn’t.
http://www.markneigh.com/post/40586795
“The value of a perk is inversely related to the expectation of that perk.” - Seth’s Blog: When you least expect it (via fred-wilson)
http://www.markneigh.com/post/40570632
Ross Rolled: The new Rick Rolled, now w/even more beard!
http://www.markneigh.com/post/40442565
“As with all quantitative methods, Web analytics is a dangerous game. If you measure the wrong thing, your metrics won’t just be weak — they’ll be directly misleading and might cause you to pursue an erroneous strategy that reduces your design’s business value.” - Nielsen on Bounce Rates
http://www.markneigh.com/post/40441717
Vanity Fair BLOGOPTICON Quadrant Chart
http://www.markneigh.com/post/40425819
Peter Doig’s work is so beautiful. Haunting.
http://www.markneigh.com/post/40425095
I can’t tell if this Google Adsense ad is genuis or not.But I did click on it.It’s always been a secret dream to run the most absurd ad as well as the most researched, strategic ad and test.My guess: Absurdity wins.
http://www.markneigh.com/post/40424619
Though we’ve all seen a million examples of contextual advertising gone horribly wrong.Is it worth the risk to think all our research and strategy can “perfectly target” when that target could be really small or completely, horrifically, total-bad-taste-in-my-mouth wrong?
http://www.markneigh.com/post/39067618
“Here is a theory. Top athletes are compelling because they embody the comparison-based achievement we Americans revere - fastest, strongest - and because they do so in a totally unambiguous way. Questions of the best plumber or best managerial accountant are impossible even to define, whereas the best relief pitcher, free-throw shooter, or female tennis player is, at any given time, a matter of public statistical record. Top athletes fascinate us by appealing to our twin compulsions with competitive superiority and hard data.” - David Foster Wallace, “How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart”
http://www.markneigh.com/post/38891241
Banner Blindness: Old and New Findings: Jakob Nielson’s recent eyetracking research confirms what we all already know: people are good at ignoring display ads. The ads subjects did look at fell into four categories: relevant copy, faces, cleavage (or other private parts) and ads that mimic site UI (which practice Nielson does not condone).
http://www.markneigh.com/post/38779829
“The problem isn’t the widgets - it’s the introduction of noise into your otherwise strong signal.” - chasgrundy, in reply to Why Widgets Is The Wrong Word For What We’re Doing
http://www.markneigh.com/post/38754824
The growing penetration of service like Tivo, OnDemand, Internet and DVD television has led many to argue for the death of the 30 sec spot. Of course may have posited their own arguments against the death of the 30 sec. It’s not a debate I wish to get entangled with.What I was wondering, over a 1/2 slab of ribs and Smithwicks, is: What percent of those 30s are viewed on closed circuit TVs in bars and dentist waiting rooms where the audience has no remote control? I don’t have any facts - though I’d love to see them - but I would have to imagine pretty high.If I’m right that creates a very interesting challenge for copywriters, suddenly without the advertising power of smart aleck dialogue, reassuring V/O or chet swelling indie anthems. It would be an interesting exercise to turn of the volume and try to figure out the brand messaging of the TV spots. Will commercials lean heavier on infographics and pantomime? How do you convey product benefits in a 30 without sound?Thoughts?
http://www.markneigh.com/post/38683149
“Pleasure reading is also known as “ludic reading.” Victor Nell has studied pleasure reading (PDF). Two fascinating notions:1) When we like a text, we read more slowly.2) When we’re really engaged in a text, it’s like being in an effortless trance.Ludic reading can be achieved on the Web, but the environment works against you. Read a nice sentence, get dinged by IM, never return to the story again.”- Michael Agger, Lazy Bastards: How we read online.
http://www.markneigh.com/post/38650505
“I tend to take a lot of meetings that others might feel are unproductive. And they often are unproductive for me. But there is a lot of serendipity in this world and you never know when an unproductive meeting turns into a productive one.” - Fred Wilson, Managing “Unproductive” Meetings
http://www.markneigh.com/post/38078991/i-tend-to-take-a-lot-of-meetings-that-others-might
Is Google Making Us Stupid?: via catbird:Here’s the short answer, since you won’t actually read the article because it’s 4 pages long: Yeah, probably
http://www.markneigh.com/post/37918744/is-google-making-us-stupid
Is Google Making Us Stupid?: via catbird:
Here’s the short answer, since you won’t actually read the article because it’s 4 pages long: Yeah, probably
http://www.markneigh.com/post/37918744
How the Web Was Won: 2008 marks the 50th anniversary of ARPA and Vanity Fair celebrates with an oral history of the Internet.
http://www.markneigh.com/post/37310658
“Physical restrictions on cultural access in the pre-digital era not only created fan communities by necessity, but also influenced the politics of the end product.” - Ryan Bigge, Can subcultures still thrive in the glare of the digital age?
http://www.markneigh.com/post/37310207
“The solution, rather, is learning to “let the bits go” - so that one can be online constantly, or twice a day, or anything in between. Practicing bit literacy allows you to work whenever and wherever you want, without feeling stressed or guilty from all the incoming information. Specifically in email, this means emptying the inbox once a day, a process that relies on deferring action items to a future day’s todo list - a skill that has hardly been discussed, let alone practiced, in today’s workplace.” - Good Experience Blog (via tomwillerer)
http://www.markneigh.com/post/37309719
TechnoTheory points to an article at Everyday Systems that has coined the perfect phrase: Weekend Luddite.Luddites, historically, were craftsman who railed against the growing technology that threatened to destroy their livelihood. In more recent times the term has been used, pejoratively or not, to describe Neil Postman-esque techno-phobes. Those opposed to technology for more philosophical/pedagogical reasons.Reinhard Engels at Everyday Systems is using it to say: Stop obsessing over your laptop, iPhone and Blackberry when you don’t have to. As he explains:For every “labor saving” device it seems there are at least two “time consuming” ones to soak up all that freed time again. T.S. Eliot wrote something about us moderns being “distracted by distraction from distraction,” and that was pre-Internet and pre-TV. We’re in infinitely worse shape now. I call this larger issue “distraction management.”
http://www.markneigh.com/post/37304984/weekend-luddite
TechnoTheory points to an article at Everyday Systems that has coined the perfect phrase: Weekend Luddite.
Luddites, historically, were craftsman who railed against the growing technology that threatened to destroy their livelihood. In more recent times the term has been used, pejoratively or not, to describe Neil Postman-esque techno-phobes. Those opposed to technology for more philosophical/pedagogical reasons.
Reinhard Engels at Everyday Systems is using it to say: Stop obsessing over your laptop, iPhone and Blackberry when you don’t have to. As he explains:
For every “labor saving” device it seems there are at least two “time consuming” ones to soak up all that freed time again. T.S. Eliot wrote something about us moderns being “distracted by distraction from distraction,” and that was pre-Internet and pre-TV. We’re in infinitely worse shape now. I call this larger issue “distraction management.”
http://www.markneigh.com/post/37304984
Excited to go to SEED tomorrow. Looking forward to more counter-intuitive wisdom from 37signals, Coudal et al.
Made use of some of that advice recently when an “emergency” conference call between about six parties in three time zones was deemed necessary. As the slew of “I’m available x. Whan are you available?” emails started flying I thought “This call is going to kill me. Just getting this call set up is going to kill me.”
Signal vs. Noise drew my attention to a Tim Ferriss post about Results-Only Work Environment (ROWE) with this great little anectdote introducing “blizzard goggles”:
One day, before ROWE, Phil was unable to come into work because of a snowstorm, which in Minnesota is perhaps the ultimate in socially acceptable excuses. Phil had six meetings scheduled for that day that were canceled because everyone was having trouble getting to the office. When he returned the next day, four of those meetings were never rescheduled. One was resolved with an e-mail, another with a phone call.
He had spent much of his “snow day” worrying about those six meetings. He was ready to drive in and brave the weather in order to have them. Now that he’s in a ROWE he thinks about that snow day a lot. When an invitation to a meeting comes up or when he’s thinking about scheduling a meeting, he puts on his “blizzard goggles.” Is this meeting really necessary? If there were a snowstorm today, would that meeting fade away, or could it be taken care of with an e-mail, or, would it in fact prove to have genuine
I avoided the headache and time suck of that conference call by drafting a quick email that addressed everyone’s concerns and answering all the open questions.
http://www.markneigh.com/post/37289337
Excited to go to SEED tomorrow. Looking forward to more counter-intuitive wisdom from 37signals, Coudal et al.Made use of some of that advice recently when an “emergency” conference call between about six parties in three time zones was deemed necessary. As the slew of “I’m available x. Whan are you available?” emails started flying I thought “This call is going to kill me. Just getting this call set up is going to kill me.”Signal vs. Noise drew my attention to a Tim Ferriss post about Results-Only Work Environment (ROWE) with this great little anectdote introducing “blizzard goggles”:One day, before ROWE, Phil was unable to come into work because of a snowstorm, which in Minnesota is perhaps the ultimate in socially acceptable excuses. Phil had six meetings scheduled for that day that were canceled because everyone was having trouble getting to the office. When he returned the next day, four of those meetings were never rescheduled. One was resolved with an e-mail, another with a phone call.He had spent much of his “snow day” worrying about those six meetings. He was ready to drive in and brave the weather in order to have them. Now that he’s in a ROWE he thinks about that snow day a lot. When an invitation to a meeting comes up or when he’s thinking about scheduling a meeting, he puts on his “blizzard goggles.” Is this meeting really necessary? If there were a snowstorm today, would that meeting fade away, or could it be taken care of with an e-mail, or, would it in fact prove to have genuineI avoided the headache and time suck of that conference call by drafting a quick email that addressed everyone’s concerns and answering all the open questions.
http://www.markneigh.com/post/37289337/meetings-are-toxic
re-posting Things looking up — mostly from twitterstatus:
“In the last 36hrs, we’ve had 99.4% uptime (according to Pingdom), which is not where we want to be, but is a heck of a lot better than the couple days before. At the same time, average page response time has been substantially reduced. And the number of updates and other key metrics are significantly higher. (We had more visits to the site than ever in our history yesterday.)
So some of the short-term measures we’ve put in place seem to be working.
However, we still have the same self-imposed limits on API requests, and IM is still off. This is still our top priority to restore.
Also, Track is not working currently via SMS. This is a bug not a limit. We’re looking into it.”
http://www.markneigh.com/post/37089022
re-posting Things looking up — mostly from twitterstatus:“In the last 36hrs, we’ve had 99.4% uptime (according to Pingdom), which is not where we want to be, but is a heck of a lot better than the couple days before. At the same time, average page response time has been substantially reduced. And the number of updates and other key metrics are significantly higher. (We had more visits to the site than ever in our history yesterday.)So some of the short-term measures we’ve put in place seem to be working.However, we still have the same self-imposed limits on API requests, and IM is still off. This is still our top priority to restore.Also, Track is not working currently via SMS. This is a bug not a limit. We’re looking into it.”
http://www.markneigh.com/post/37089022/99-4-aint-half-bad
@jack Presents Twitter: And don’t miss @Biz and @ev talking to Fast Company.
http://www.markneigh.com/post/37057231
In 2003 I visited Haus der Kunst art museum in Munich. I don’t remember anything I saw on the walls there, but I do recall being enthralled by the surfers in the River Eisbach (literally “ice brook”) from a nearby bridge. This video of river surfers is fascinating and surprisingly surfing is a popular sport in Munich.
I don’t recall much of the London National Portrait Gallery either, except spotting Brendan Fraser with some mystery girl and the really tasty, free Indian food at the festival across the street.
http://www.markneigh.com/post/36932316
In 2003 I visited Haus der Kunst art museum in Munich. I don’t remember anything I saw on the walls there, but I do recall being enthralled by the surfers in the River Eisbach (literally “ice brook”) from a nearby bridge. This video of river surfers is fascinating and surprisingly surfing is a popular sport in Munich. I don’t recall much of the London National Portrait Gallery either, except spotting Brendan Fraser with some mystery girl and the really tasty, free Indian food at the festival across the street.
http://www.markneigh.com/post/36932316/wasted-on-the-young
Following up on my recent post on how SPAM deteriates validity we have a new service: RickProof. Just enter a suspect URL, check the RickGauge™ and surf Rick-risk free.
http://www.markneigh.com/post/36919530
“They are equipping billboards with tiny cameras that gather details about passers-by—their gender, approximate age and how long they looked at the billboard.” - Billboards That Look Back, The New York Times
http://www.markneigh.com/post/36916123
So Web 2.0 is “web design that aims to enhance creativity, information sharing, and, most notably, collaboration among users (wikipedia).” The whole sort of emerged after comments by Tim O’Reilly regarding success on he platform of the Internet. A recent post has O’Reilly going back and struggling with what Web 2.0 is and if into the future the Web need have such lame names. But really its just giving people the tools to build whatever they want to build.Web 2.5, then, is taking all the C in UGC and trying to make some sense of it. Laying usable UIs over content and drawing lines between data that allows the user to get some functional use out of all this collaborative stuff we’ve made.YouTube is notoriously ugly, as are a lot of these successful 2.0-ish sites, clearly functionality was top on their lists and thankfully so. But YouTube’s design flaws aren’t just aesthetic, they effect usability and experience. Search is awkward, categories and tags a often not helpful and the whole site seems to be created to force more pageviews. Introduce Timetube, a service that takes all the great content YouTube made possible and makes it easier to organize and digest. (Do a quick search of “old lady” because that “Old Lady VS Mercedes Jerk” video is awesome.) CompFight does it for Flickr. Allowing you to quickly and easily search and browse Flickr images based on a Boolean set of criterion - most importantly to designers is the Creative Commons filter.My new favorite thing to mess with on the Web is Powerset, a semantic search engine that uses the considerable data of wikipedia to generate webs of data connectivity. Wikipedia is great and I’m highly indebted to all the folks who daily make it better - but it can be hard to see how things are connected. Powerset lets you start at 40,000 feet and zoom all the way in. Plus they use semantices, so if I like search “what films did David Lynch direct” it know I’m looking for the physical object “a film” and returns linked images of all the film M. Lynch has directed.These tools don’t just make Web 2.0 look better they make it work better. By building on the shoulders of the content driven Web 2.0 this growing Web 2.5 (or whatever you want to call it) will help us better trudge through the noise of the Internet and pull out the signal.This is by no means a comprehensive list so please let me know of other Web 2.5-ish tools out there.
http://www.markneigh.com/post/36782515/web-2-5-or-making-sense-of-all-this-user-generated
So Web 2.0 is “web design that aims to enhance creativity, information sharing, and, most notably, collaboration among users (wikipedia).” The whole sort of emerged after comments by Tim O’Reilly regarding success on he platform of the Internet. A recent post has O’Reilly going back and struggling with what Web 2.0 is and if into the future the Web need have such lame names. But really its just giving people the tools to build whatever they want to build.
Web 2.5, then, is taking all the C in UGC and trying to make some sense of it. Laying usable UIs over content and drawing lines between data that allows the user to get some functional use out of all this collaborative stuff we’ve made.
YouTube is notoriously ugly, as are a lot of these successful 2.0-ish sites, clearly functionality was top on their lists and thankfully so. But YouTube’s design flaws aren’t just aesthetic, they effect usability and experience. Search is awkward, categories and tags a often not helpful and the whole site seems to be created to force more pageviews. Introduce Timetube, a service that takes all the great content YouTube made possible and makes it easier to organize and digest. (Do a quick search of “old lady” because that “Old Lady VS Mercedes Jerk” video is awesome.)
CompFight does it for Flickr. Allowing you to quickly and easily search and browse Flickr images based on a Boolean set of criterion - most importantly to designers is the Creative Commons filter.
My new favorite thing to mess with on the Web is Powerset, a semantic search engine that uses the considerable data of wikipedia to generate webs of data connectivity. Wikipedia is great and I’m highly indebted to all the folks who daily make it better - but it can be hard to see how things are connected. Powerset lets you start at 40,000 feet and zoom all the way in. Plus they use semantices, so if I like search “what films did David Lynch direct” it know I’m looking for the physical object “a film” and returns linked images of all the film M. Lynch has directed.
These tools don’t just make Web 2.0 look better they make it work better. By building on the shoulders of the content driven Web 2.0 this growing Web 2.5 (or whatever you want to call it) will help us better trudge through the noise of the Internet and pull out the signal.
This is by no means a comprehensive list so please let me know of other Web 2.5-ish tools out there.
http://www.markneigh.com/post/36782515
Telegraphese is characterized by structures smaller than a grammatically complete sentence in Standard English. Their use, and name, derived from the fact that the telegraph charged per word or sometimes letter; therefore the terser the sentence the cheaper the telegram. I am working on a research paper connecting telegraphese with contemporary e-style English, particularly the 140 character constraint of Twitter.
If you have a couple minutes you could really help my project. Please compose a tweet in response to the below situation and Twitter it to @MarkN. Don’t worry, there is no right or wrong way to respond - just the way you would respond when constrained to
Thanks so much for your help… and I have some invites for Evernote and Brightkite if you need a little compensation.
SITUATION:
You have booked a flight from New York to Paris that was canceled because of a bomb threat. You are stuck at JFK Airport and do not know when you will have a flight to Paris.
http://www.markneigh.com/post/36716636
Telegraphese is characterized by structures smaller than a grammatically complete sentence in Standard English. Their use, and name, derived from the fact that the telegraph charged per word or sometimes letter; therefore the terser the sentence the cheaper the telegram. I am working on a research paper connecting telegraphese with contemporary e-style English, particularly the 140 character constraint of Twitter.If you have a couple minutes you could really help my project. Please compose a tweet in response to the below situation and Twitter it to @MarkN. Don’t worry, there is no right or wrong way to respond - just the way you would respond when constrained toThanks so much for your help… and I have some invites for Evernote and Brightkite if you need a little compensation.SITUATION:You have booked a flight from New York to Paris that was canceled because of a bomb threat. You are stuck at JFK Airport and do not know when you will have a flight to Paris.
http://www.markneigh.com/post/36716636/a-telegraphese-request
N.B. I like what TECH Cocktail is doing and support anything that promotes the local (Chicago) tech scene. This is simply my opinions on the TECH Cocktail Conference that happened on 30 May 2008.
8:15AM - Enjoying danish and second cup of coffee when I realize that my plan to just use the iPod Touch wasn’t going to work because I can’t download Loyola’s wireless agent - going paper and pen.
8:30AM - Lots of business cards coming my way and I realize I forgot to bring any. Quickly I change my name tag to @MarkN to indicate a snarky “If you’re not on Twitter I don’t want to talk to you anyway so that’s why I don’t have cards.”
8:45AM - Subjected to (ironic?) music video “Ballad of TECH Cocktail.” (Trust me, you’ll bail after :30).
9:00AM - Mike Domek, CEO of Tickets Now, talks about building a business from anywhere. Basically he started selling scalped second market tickets from his living room in 1992 and did well enough to be bought out by Ticket Master, like 6 on a list of the Top 10 Most Evil Online Businesses, Ticket Master. His advice: 1) Be Passionate 2) Know Your Strengths and Weaknesses 3) Turn Your Mistakes Into Successes. Mind blowing.
9:35AM - So, yeah, they gave us 5 minutes between talks, like, Mike Domek drones on from 9:00 to like 9:27, gives a couple minutes for questions and then 5 minutes later the next speaker gets going. Which next speakers were the ever hip guys from Threadless. They injected the conf. with an (already) much needed jolt of energy and humor as they discussed lo-tech solutions to large scale scaling issues. Plus lots of funny images and BIG TYPE.
10:10AM - LEVERAGING SOCIAL APPS & WIDGETS FOR YOU BUSINESS PANEL. Like just about every panel I’ve ever seen on Facebook widgets it started out as a bunch of widget makers explaining why their widgets are a lot better and make more money than everyone elses widgets (seriously, there was like a 10-min manifesto from Troy Henikoff on the future of widgets during his frickin intro).
10:15AM - In the elevator. Yeah, I didn’t mention, so one room of the conf. is on the 15th floor and the other is on the 2nd floor with only 3 elevators in between. This didn’t make things very easy during those 5 mins between sessions.
10:20ishAM - Enter a crowded Breakout Room 208 to hear the Feedburner guys say some pretty interesting things about designing with users in mind. Be yourself, be fast, give up control, be engaged, be polite, be suprising. Really good stuff and interestingly told. The Hack-A-Thon is a great Take one day and try to implement all the stuff your users have been asking for.
10:50AM - Stayed in Rm208 for an AOL/Intuit run 30 minute brainstorm on “How to stay in touch with all the folks you meet at TECH Conference after TECH conference is over.” It was a pretty fun process of throwing out breaking into groups and sketching out the and then presenting them. Ours was a form you’d fill out at registration that lets you know who you should try to meet based on your preferences & c. Pretty sure its been done before, but if not, please note the (CC) below.
11:25AM - Got all schizo b/c I thought I’d stay in Rm208 for a SEM thing, even had it circled on my schedule, but then decided to go up to the Kasbeer Hall for something on thinking about partners and ended up getting more coffee and waiting to eat.
12:00-1:00PM - Lunch. Oh my goodness they found this motivational speaker who just wrote a book called Your Inner CEO: Unleash the Executive Within who blathered on and on, mostly incoherently, about facing your fears and deciding who you really want to be. Even worse was this motivational speaker guy was supposed to stop at 12:30 and 37signal’s personality Jason Fried was supposed to pick up. But, apparently Jason Fried had some sort of food poisoning and this poor motivational speaker had to dig around for an extra half hour for interesting anecdotes e.g. he threw a supposedly rip roaring party because he’d discovered that he was boring and missing out on the fun.
1:10PM - Jared Goralnick of Techno Theory shared some productivity hacks. He had some pretty cool stuff, like Jott which creates a number you call and then converts whatever you say into an email or my favorite advice about going home at the end of the day instead of looking for more work to do.
1:45PM - OK, big post-lunch mistake, was going to head back up to the Hall for a panel (groan) on Social Media to hear what @darmano had to say, but didn’t feel like making the trek (note the thing about being 13 floors down with three elevators) and decided to hang out for Jason Rexilius’ bit called Cloud Computing and Scaling. Now Jason was probably the most lucid, interesting speaker of the day so the utter pain of it had nothing to do with him. This is just after lunch and in the interest of full disclosure I am not a developer or information architect or anything and have absolutely no business being in a session called Cloud Computing and Scaling. The one note I jotted down is that EBay has so much down time because they do some sort of poor load serving thing.
2:30PM - Fraser Kelton’s session on understanding the semantic Web was great and he explained things super simply and introduced me to my new favorite thing on-line: Powerset. Which has semantically tagged all of wikipedia and lets you search it in this really cool way.
3:00PM - On my way to the Brown line to do some reading, drink more coffee and get ready for Nothing personal to the panel on finding funding, ‘The Wizard’, Gary Vaynerchuk or the folks at John Barleycorn’s (really, John Barleycorn’s) but I’d had enough conference for one day.
http://www.markneigh.com/post/36609931
N.B. I like what TECH Cocktail is doing and support anything that promotes the local (Chicago) tech scene. This is simply my opinions on the TECH Cocktail Conference that happened on 30 May 2008. 8:15AM - Enjoying danish and second cup of coffee when I realize that my plan to just use the iPod Touch wasn’t going to work because I can’t download Loyola’s wireless agent - going paper and pen.8:30AM - Lots of business cards coming my way and I realize I forgot to bring any. Quickly I change my name tag to @MarkN to indicate a snarky “If you’re not on Twitter I don’t want to talk to you anyway so that’s why I don’t have cards.”8:45AM - Subjected to (ironic?) music video “Ballad of TECH Cocktail.” (Trust me, you’ll bail after :30).9:00AM - Mike Domek, CEO of Tickets Now, talks about building a business from anywhere. Basically he started selling scalped second market tickets from his living room in 1992 and did well enough to be bought out by Ticket Master, like 6 on a list of the Top 10 Most Evil Online Businesses, Ticket Master. His advice: 1) Be Passionate 2) Know Your Strengths and Weaknesses 3) Turn Your Mistakes Into Successes. Mind blowing.9:35AM - So, yeah, they gave us 5 minutes between talks, like, Mike Domek drones on from 9:00 to like 9:27, gives a couple minutes for questions and then 5 minutes later the next speaker gets going. Which next speakers were the ever hip guys from Threadless. They injected the conf. with an (already) much needed jolt of energy and humor as they discussed lo-tech solutions to large scale scaling issues. Plus lots of funny images and BIG TYPE.10:10AM - LEVERAGING SOCIAL APPS & WIDGETS FOR YOU BUSINESS PANEL. Like just about every panel I’ve ever seen on Facebook widgets it started out as a bunch of widget makers explaining why their widgets are a lot better and make more money than everyone elses widgets (seriously, there was like a 10-min manifesto from Troy Henikoff on the future of widgets during his frickin intro).10:15AM - In the elevator. Yeah, I didn’t mention, so one room of the conf. is on the 15th floor and the other is on the 2nd floor with only 3 elevators in between. This didn’t make things very easy during those 5 mins between sessions.10:20ishAM - Enter a crowded Breakout Room 208 to hear the Feedburner guys say some pretty interesting things about designing with users in mind. Be yourself, be fast, give up control, be engaged, be polite, be suprising. Really good stuff and interestingly told. The Hack-A-Thon is a great Take one day and try to implement all the stuff your users have been asking for.10:50AM - Stayed in Rm208 for an AOL/Intuit run 30 minute brainstorm on “How to stay in touch with all the folks you meet at TECH Conference after TECH conference is over.” It was a pretty fun process of throwing out breaking into groups and sketching out the and then presenting them. Ours was a form you’d fill out at registration that lets you know who you should try to meet based on your preferences & c. Pretty sure its been done before, but if not, please note the (CC) below.11:25AM - Got all schizo b/c I thought I’d stay in Rm208 for a SEM thing, even had it circled on my schedule, but then decided to go up to the Kasbeer Hall for something on thinking about partners and ended up getting more coffee and waiting to eat.12:00-1:00PM - Lunch. Oh my goodness they found this motivational speaker who just wrote a book called Your Inner CEO: Unleash the Executive Within who blathered on and on, mostly incoherently, about facing your fears and deciding who you really want to be. Even worse was this motivational speaker guy was supposed to stop at 12:30 and 37signal’s personality Jason Fried was supposed to pick up. But, apparently Jason Fried had some sort of food poisoning and this poor motivational speaker had to dig around for an extra half hour for interesting anecdotes e.g. he threw a supposedly rip roaring party because he’d discovered that he was boring and missing out on the fun.1:10PM - Jared Goralnick of Techno Theory shared some productivity hacks. He had some pretty cool stuff, like Jott which creates a number you call and then converts whatever you say into an email or my favorite advice about going home at the end of the day instead of looking for more work to do.1:45PM - OK, big post-lunch mistake, was going to head back up to the Hall for a panel (groan) on Social Media to hear what @darmano had to say, but didn’t feel like making the trek (note the thing about being 13 floors down with three elevators) and decided to hang out for Jason Rexilius’ bit called Cloud Computing and Scaling. Now Jason was probably the most lucid, interesting speaker of the day so the utter pain of it had nothing to do with him. This is just after lunch and in the interest of full disclosure I am not a developer or information architect or anything and have absolutely no business being in a session called Cloud Computing and Scaling. The one note I jotted down is that EBay has so much down time because they do some sort of poor load serving thing.2:30PM - Fraser Kelton’s session on understanding the semantic Web was great and he explained things super simply and introduced me to my new favorite thing on-line: Powerset. Which has semantically tagged all of wikipedia and lets you search it in this really cool way.3:00PM - On my way to the Brown line to do some reading, drink more coffee and get ready for Nothing personal to the panel on finding funding, ‘The Wizard’, Gary Vaynerchuk or the folks at John Barleycorn’s (really, John Barleycorn’s) but I’d had enough conference for one day.
http://www.markneigh.com/post/36609931/a-slackers-guide-to-the-2008-chicago-tech-cocktail
Common Craft delights with a new video: Social Media in Plain English. (If you missed Twitter in Plain English check it out too. Like now!)
http://www.markneigh.com/post/36599724
“The problem with hype is that it transforms the use value of a would-be work of art into its exchange value.” - “The Hype Cycle”, n+1
http://www.markneigh.com/post/36595436
What I really hate about spam is how is that it can be so good at making noise look like signal that you start to filter out the stuff you really want. Recently I threw away a credit card I was waiting for because it looked like the plain, non-descript envelopes that credit card spammers have started to send credit card offers in.
I miss important emails because my spam filter made them bypass my inbox.
I don’t follow people back on Twitter that I don’t know because there are so many Twitter spammers.
Facebook had to completely revamp their Invite functionality because unscrupulous developers forced people to invite friends in order to use the application. These few developers have done something worse though - they’ve lowered users trust.
And now “an April 2008 poll by SurveyUSA estimated that at least 18 million American adults have been rickrolled.” A bait and switch practice where an ostensibly relevant link in fact leads users to a music video for the 1987 Rick Astley song “Never Gonna Give You Up.”
With the prominence of URL shortening services, e.g. Tiny URL, jokes like rickrolling threaten to put links (the Internet’s greatest innovation) in danger of mistrust.
http://www.markneigh.com/post/36367897
What I really hate about spam is how is that it can be so good at making noise look like signal that you start to filter out the stuff you really want. Recently I threw away a credit card I was waiting for because it looked like the plain, non-descript envelopes that credit card spammers have started to send credit card offers in.I miss important emails because my spam filter made them bypass my inbox.I don’t follow people back on Twitter that I don’t know because there are so many Twitter spammers.Facebook had to completely revamp their Invite functionality because unscrupulous developers forced people to invite friends in order to use the application. These few developers have done something worse though - they’ve lowered users trust.And now “an April 2008 poll by SurveyUSA estimated that at least 18 million American adults have been rickrolled.” A bait and switch practice where an ostensibly relevant link in fact leads users to a music video for the 1987 Rick Astley song “Never Gonna Give You Up.”With the prominence of URL shortening services, e.g. Tiny URL, jokes like rickrolling threaten to put links (the Internet’s greatest innovation) in danger of mistrust.
http://www.markneigh.com/post/36367897/spam
“As an industry, we’re awfully good (and by good I mean bad) at bastardizing or perverting pretty much any natural and pure expression of engagement, influence, authenticity or passion.” - Joseph Jaffe, Conversation Killers
http://www.markneigh.com/post/36366748
“Media companies still look on the internet as a content platform. That is, they think of it as a new broadcast medium. Most other folks recognize that the internet is a communications medium, and the focus should be on the ease of communication.” - Mike Masnic, re: Viacom’s YouTube lawsuit
http://www.markneigh.com/post/36223806
Delightful post re: Why you should target Wall Street brokers as samurais.: From the good folks at Advertising for Peanuts.
http://www.markneigh.com/post/35706718
“Exercise in expressing oneself in different ways will be of considerable importance in general for the acquisition of - Desiderius Erasmus, Copia: Foundations of the Abundant Style
http://www.markneigh.com/post/35692529
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