Bad News for the Blogosphere

Blog readership is stagnant, according to the Gallup poll. Cheers to Marketingvox for pointing to the survey. With tens of thousands of new blogs starting up every day, and the readership at large not growing. Does that mean we better not invest in that new blog startup?

A Thanks to Matt Cutts

I just wanted to give a public thanks to Matt Cutts for this post. I know of at least one person that this will mean a lot to, and I think it was very generous of Matt to do it. Kudos.

I think you’ve missed the point.

As is common in the blogosphere, one rant begits thousands. I’ve read a few of them,here, here, and here. The rant of the day seems to be “buy a domain, don’t under any circumstances blog with a subdomain of blogspot, typepad, or any other service you do not own. Bah. Poppycock. I think you missed the train. It’s not about what domain you use, really. Of all the things to worry about, getting your own domain for your blog is not something that need to be a huge priority.

It’s difficult to get a decent domain these days anyway. I really think a subdomain like blogging.typepad.com is a lot more memorable than something like immobloggingthis.com (which is one of the better alternatives my domain registration service recommended when I typed in ‘blogging’), or even worse, i-am-a-keyword-spammer.info.

But, I may just be a curmudgeon.

Reaching your peak productivity level

I was reading a post on Darren Rowse’s blog just now, that got me thinking about achieving your peak productivity level. Darren was talking about how there are certain skills as a blogger with which he feels himself lacking. I think he does pretty well with the one key skill a blogger needs to succeed; communicating ideas. I don’t really see that him spending time in things like design and coding will really be a good use of his time. It’s easy enough to hire someone to do a great design for your site, as an example. Easier, certainly, than learning how to design, spending hours upon hours, and ending up with an amateurish product. I’m not saying his site is amateurish, it’s very nice looking (far better than mine), but design is in my opinion an art as much as a skill and it could take years for someone to build up the talent they could easily hire at the cost of a few hundred dollars.

I come from an old-fashioned New England family where one of the most highly-valued qualities was being self-sufficient. I’m one generation away from the small farmer who lived off the land and sold excess at the market for spending cash. That may have served my ancestors very well in the 19th century, but it’s not going to serve me or my decendants very well in the 21st.
It’s something I struggle a lot with, and that’s the reason Darren’s post resonated with me. I think a lot of us wrestle with that to some degree.

And, I’m very often guilty of not following my own advice. I get frustrated when trying to explain to an employee or a contractor how I want them to do a job. Time and time again I’ll just jump in and start working on it myself. But, when I do that I distract myself from the higher level things that I should be doing. It’s something that prevents me from reaching my peak productivity level. In fact, the skill I need to continue to develop to avoid this paradox is communication. I need to more effectively communicate with the people I pay to help me, to make them more effective at the skills that they provide. They, and better communication skills, will help me reach peak productivity.

Bush Wants to Violate my Fourth Ammendment Rights? And Yours too!

“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

The authors of the Constitution were very wise to include this. I have no words to describe the lack of respect I have for Bush for such a massive attempt to violate my Constitutional rights. Yours too, if you’re a US citizen that is. I search Google every day. President Bush wants Google to hand over records of all requests for a randomly specified week. I can’t remember a day when I haven’t done a Google search, let alone a whole week. In effect, Bush wants to violate my rights.

All Nixon did was have some of his goons break into a hotel room. Bush wants to break into millions of people’s private records. I feel like vomiting.

More people who’ve written about this:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/20/technology/20google.html
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2006/01/20/MNGEVGQED31.DTL
http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/blogs/gelman/archives/003720.shtml
http://battellemedia.com/archives/002249.php
http://www.danieldrezner.com/archives/002534.html
http://belowbeltway.blogspot.com/2006/01/getting-news-wrong.html
http://www.sharpseo.com/blog/index.php/archives/8
http://hotchic.wordpress.com/2006/01/20/ny-times-google-porn-privacy-article/
http://cypherjf.sscentral.com/2006/01/20/rock-on-google/
http://varun.vk123.com/2006/01/20/yahoo-gave-search-data-to-bush-administration/
http://www.concurringopinions.com/archives/2006/01/government_vs_g.html
http://blog.braverman.org/PermaLink,guid,67b6c1f5-ff63-4469-b2f7-4621ac8fde60.aspx
http://www.concurringopinions.com/archives/2006/01/do_no_evil_and_1.html

That’s just a random sampling of people who’ve blogged about this topic this morning. Technorati lists thousands of posts on the subject already! I might add more later.

It’s really not all about the tools

I saw this mentioned on Andy Wibbels’s blog. Success with Adsense, it seems (if you believe what you’re reading there), is all about the tools you use. “The tools they use are their secret weapons” might very well be true for an SEO practicing the dark arts, but I don’t believe it is the sound basis for long-term business strategy. Secret weapon tools makes it sound like it’s all about trickery. I think it’s all about traffic. Sure, you can trick the search engines using the latest tools, into sending you a lot of traffic and you might earn a pretty good paycheck this month from Adsense but I don’t believe it’s sustainable.

Learned something new about Sitepoint today

No, it’s not new to hear someone complaining about popups. I’ve never noticed the middle-click autoscroll icon before, though. I think it’s very slick. It accomplishes nothing, but it’s slick nonetheless. Nothing I’d waste effort doing on my own sites, but, lol… very slick.

Why it’s a good idea to work yourself out of a job

I am reminded by this thread at sitepoint why I think it’s a good idea to work yourself out of a job. I’ve worked myself out of a number of good jobs in the past. In 1995, for example, I was working for the Harvard Management Company overseeing their foreign investments. A big part of my job was just verification that the securities that the fund managers wanted were actually purchased and put into the correct account. So, I’d call Deutche Bank (or one of the other half-dozen that they dealt with), get a report sent to me and manually verify that all the securities were present in the correct amount. It seemed stupid to me to do all this work manually, so I worked with one of the programmers on staff to create an automated system to complete this task. It took several months to develop it, but finally it came to a point where we got the banks to submit a file instead of hard copy and could run the file against the fund’s database to verify security positions and you’d instantly have a report showing anything that didn’t match up. Other parts of my job there were easily shifted to other employees, and there was nothing left for me to do. I could have came up with 100 reasons , hemmed and hawed, stonewalled or a thousand other things and kept the job for years to come, but it just didn’t make sense. The only way I could feel good about what I was doing is when I was doing what I considered the best thing, and adding value to the company. The price of keeping the job, my integrity, was far too high to pay. The correct choice is always to do your best job and be honest to yourself and your employer.

The Sharper Image = Bad Corporate Citizen

In this season of thanks and gift giving I think it would do us all well to consider to whom we bestow the honor of our business. It is my personal philosophy that corporations are equally responsible for conducting themselves in a manner for the betterment of humanity. When it comes to my attention that a corporatiion has not been conducting itself in a manner which I consider proper, I will then choose to not reward them with future business.

I recently read that The Sharper Image has been conducting itself in a manner in which I would consider to be very harmful to the welfare of our nation. Specifically, last year they brought a lawsuit in California against Consumer Reports seeking to silence that publication. Consumer Reports had rated their ‘Ionic Breeze Quadra’ as “ineffective” and The Sharper Image sued.

There are many better ways The Sharper Image could have reacted to this report. They could have followed the example of Tylanol who pulled their products off the shelves when they were found to be harmful. They could have done nothing. They could have simply sought to improve their product. Sadly, though, they proved to be a bad corporate citizen.

Iraq = Vietnam

Can’t help but think it. Nobody can deny anymore that it’s become a guerilla war. That’s what it is, there’s no sense in calling it anything else. When the US troops invaded, the Iraqi troops didn’t surrender, they just went underground, like the Vietcong did. There’s no winning for the US. Winning would be at too high a price, we’d have to massively slaughter Iraqis, like everyone’s seen in the video of US soldiers pumping bullets into wounded Iraqis. Terrorists? Vietcong? Guerillas? We’re just mincing words now.

« Previous Page — Next Page »