Blogging as Image Control

“Leonsis is what you might call a defensive blogger. His main goal isn’t to enter into a ‘conversation’ with the AOL ‘community,’ but just to gain more control over the results that show up when people google him.” – Nick Carr

If you have blog and it isn’t the first thing that comes up in searches for your name – there’s something seriously wrong. I see nothing wrong with this strategy – often times, it’s the easiest strategy for people to glean when I talk about reasons to blog.

Whether this strategy is ‘cluetrain-friendly’ is a separate issue. It is however far better than someone other than yourself controlling your search results.

Related: Take Control of Your Reputation – Blog

Computers and Cars: Differences and Similarities

Driving around this weekend with the family and the dome light in the car wouldn’t turn off. An irritation for sure, but not as serious an issue as the speedometer, tachometer, or odometer not functioning at all. Freaky.

Scouring through the owners manual while still on the road, we came up with nothing. Not even sure why Chrysler spent the money on printing, all it did was frustrate us more.

Also this week, my decade-plus-old Apple Personal LaserWriter 300 came home after a long absence. This printer is a workhorse – printing on anything that’ll fit in the paper slot

Unfortunately, despite having the hardware to bring the printer into the home network, none of computers we use these days have the software to recognize it. I suppose it goes on a shelf next to my Remington Rands and Smith Coronas.

Imagine if your car no longer fit on the road. Baffling.

Studying Buggywhips

“‘Go forth and make media,’ I told the group. ‘You want to be a journalist, be one! There’s no badge that makes you one, no degree, no license (thank God and the founding fathers), no credentials and no special anointing from the New York Times. So just do it.’ This again drew a few moans and rolled eyes.” – Terry Heaton

Maybe there was a time when Bachelor-level studies prepped people to lead a profession. I’m not confident. For me, it was 4 years of understanding background, history, and gaining basic skills like critical thinking and taking criticism. A few years back I explored going back to school to get a better foundation for some of the things I’m doing today. In the end, I decided that 2 years doing in the “real world” would better serve me.

To those rolling their eyes – I didn’t graduate that long ago, and what I’m doing today didn’t exist then. The profession I thought I wanted to get into turned out to be really, really boring and not as cool as I thought it would be.

😉

The 5 Needs of Internet Tools

“So why did YouTube catch on? Simple — free storage.” – Dave Winer

Exactly. In YouTube’s case, I’d also throw in format conversion. Converting video into a format that is small and viewable by anyone with a Flash player is a opaque and geeky process. The reason they clicked – they did the conversion and spit back the html code.

This reminds me of this Help Needed Here checklist. Right now, it’s a list of 5 areas where our current tools aren’t that helpful. While it will rarely make sense for any single tool to provide answers to all 5, the more the better.

  • Aggregation (everything that’s interesting to me in one spot)
  • Bandwidth (so we won’t need to worry about becoming popular)
  • Conversion (video formats, presentation formats, bandwidth, and devices)
  • Filtering (Spam, news, etc)
  • Storage (video, audio, games, backups, sharing)

I’ve explicitly left off ‘community’ because these 5 attributes are pre-requisites for an online community.

Building Communities is Building Commerce

Lots of conversations this weeks about building online communities: forums, weblog networks, mailing list, what have you. All with organizations having a vested, commercial interest in growing a community.

While they expressed skepticism about a community gathering around their commercial interest, I wasn’t concerned.

  1. It’s already happening.
    A group of people somewhere are already talking about your products. Really, they are.
  2. It’s in everyone’s best interest
    It’s in Corvette’s best interest to have a fan club. It’s in Apple’s best interest to have support forums. It lowers direct support costs while increasing passion. It’s in the customers best interest to show off their expertise and passions (perhaps getting time commerce as well).
  3. In many cases, a community with a for-profit business behind it is more maintainable (see #2).
    Those with a horse-in-the-race are of course have the most to gain by a growing community.

I’m less concerned about a church v state separation in these communities. Those involved will determine the right balance – and it may change over time.

The more important bit is being a person talking to other people rather than a Marketer or a Salesman talking to Consumers.

A Per Post Ad Experiment – Now Taking Your Money

Via my WP-GotLucky plugin, I’ve been tracking the volume to a handful of real popular posts (really, there are some?) here at garrickvanburen.com just check out the ‘Most Popular Posts’ section to see the 10 mostest popularist.

Inspired by Ze Frank’s gimmesomecandy-ducky experiment, I’m now taking money for 50 character messages on each and every one of my posts.

You pick the post – any post.

One message per post.

Messages are a maximum of 50 characters – including HTML.

All posts start at $10 – the price doubles with each published message.

Messages are displayed until someone else pays the doubled price.

Message are also included in the feeds.

Europe v. US: Taxes v. GDP

We’ve got a European vacation in the works and by coincidence, the Marginal Revolution has a nice U.S. vs. Europe comparison thread running.

“Further, a recent study has shown that Germans and Americans spend the same amount of time working, but the proportion of taxable market time vs. nontaxable home work time is different. In other words, Germans work just as much, but more of their work is not captured in the taxable market.” – Edward Prescott

Huh.

I’ve been wondering if increased transparency of tax spending would make higher rates ‘worth it’. This quote hints that the answer is no. Hmmmm.

Mom’s Courtesy Smile

The last few weeks have been a roller coaster of family emotions and get-togethers – from the passing of Grandma Hannah to Cooper’s first birthday. Add to that, all the family photos and stories and trees (back to 1751) my dad sent down. So, I’ve been thinking quite a bit about yesterday, and those places and times that don’t exist anymore.

Then, while doing tech support with my dad via Skype this morning, I caught this in my feedreader:

“She doesn’t know about blogs, bittorrent, streaming video, social media, or any of the stuff of which I write, nor does she care. She smiles when I tell her what I do, but the smile is more a courtesy than anything else, and that’s okay.” – Terry Heaton

Choked me up.

Yes, this is the explanation behind both the Unincorporated and Wrong Side of the Family mini-series over at the First Crack Podcast.