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| Saturday, August 27, 2005 |
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Stupid Website Design 1, Sales, 0 
| | I just made the mistake of trying to find a Bose outlet store. Instead I was greeted by a video of a man saying NOTHING, least of all about what I was interested in finding out. There are other outlets for other audio makers. See ya, Bose. (On second thought, probably not.) |
Do as he says, also as I do
| | The reason not to subscribe to top blogs is that, by definition, there are lots of links to them. The reason I don¹t subscribe to bloggers like Doc Searls and Tom Evslin is not that I don¹t enjoy their posts; it¹s that I have an automatic indirect subscription to their blogs, because they get a lot of linklove from some of the blogs to which I do subscribe. |
| | This led me to wonder... Do I subscribe to any "top blogs"? Well, um, no. In fact, I hardly subscribe to any blogs at all. And I generally don't look at the ones I subscribe to. (They tend to occupy the nowhere below the bottom of the window.) Mostly I subscribe to searches, and I keep changing those. Ugliest dog, for example. Or "Kim Cameron" and identity. This Spring for awhile I had ratzinger and "white smoke". I've had a variety involving syndicate or syndication plus other words. I have one right now for asbestosis from several sources (PubSub, Technorati, Feedster) to see how they're doing with blog spam. (They're clearly working on it; but it's not easy.) Plus searches for my own name, linuxjournal.com, itgarage.com and this blog as well. |
| | Vanity isn't the only reason to have feeds of searches for one's own name. It's also one of the best ways to start, join and participate in public (multi-blog) conversations. Also to see what works and what doesn't. I'm often amazed at how little traction some posts get. I put a lot of work into Open the Pod Bay Doors, for example, and it got approximately squat — as did the podcast conversation I had with Steve Gillmor while I was writing it. This one from Thursday did a lot better. The most highly leveraged of all were these three about Tom Friedman's latest book, all of which ran in Linux Journal. Those took a lot of work (because they were real essays and not just blog posts), and it paid off. |
| | Anyway, that's my corollary to Changing Way's advice: subscribe to searches and keyword combinations. Conversations are a lot more interesting than personalities anyway. |
Lurking in the green room
| | I like what Steve is doing because it's informative and easy to listen to. No bullshit and no advertising and very leading edge. Truth is I'd pay for the podcast if that was an option because I get real value out of each one - they impact my consulting business in a positive way. I say keep it up Steve, I know it's a lot of work to put these on even if you do very little editing. The process takes time and energy and a lot of coordination especially when you have so many people on the call at once. |
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