Month: February 2008

Drew is wondering why he is giving away so much for free. In other words – how can you make it as a consultant when you have to give stuff away for free to get attention and respect.

I had two answers to this that came up – the first is that if you charged for every bit of good advice that would make you a lawyer and you’d know that Satan’s already called “next” on your afterlife. You know that in your heart it’s good to give valuable advice and maybe you believe you’re scoring some karma. A incredibly rare example of a Marketer sleeping better than someone else.

I choose to take a slightly different view – rather than see my advice as a product with a price tag on it, I see my time as the commodity. I give out advice, and if it’s good the demand will grow to the point where I run out of time (my tipping point), at that point I can engage the meter and let the bidding begin. Even if I never reach the point where the advice I share is making the mortgage payment at least I’ve gathered some karma, made some friends, and I’m still not a lawyer.

There’s been a fair amount of discussion about how much time newspapers on print and the 6pm news have left. I’m planning the party for 2/26/13. Yes, 2013 is only 5 years away. Where will you be and what will you be up to?

The big question is: Is Mahalo the next generation search engine? I’m starting to think the answer is yes. I’m already to the point of taking traffic from Wikipedia for granted. For any real search you can presume that there will be a wikipedia page in the top 10. The number one critique of Wikipedia is that eventually the editors that patrol the site will become bored, and since they are volunteers they get tired of doing work for no paycheck eventually.

So, my prediction: As the freetards get bored with wikipedia, the folks who would like to eat and have more extravagant luxuries such as health coverage will go over to Mahalo to get paid for doing the same quality of work. I think the fusion of Digg-type functionality with the distrubuted content generation of Wikipedia is a winning combination.

I am going to an event called Blogger Social in New York in April. One of the attendees, Steve Woodruff has pulled off the ultimate link bait and is doing profiles of the attendees so that you can learn about who is going to be there, before you get to the event. As a person with a last name that starts with “W” this is one of the few times I am getting lucky, I should be up there close to the event date and after the whole world is checking his site (assuming of course he makes it through the list before dying from exhaustion). This is a great example of social media in action, it’s quite possible that the 70 attendees at the event can get to know each other to some degree, even before attending the event.

Today featured Matthew Bailey, who has done a great piece of research on red shirted crewmen in Star Trek, and uses it as an example of  analytics in action. He also cites Edward Tufte, probably the closest thing to a rock star that you can find in the world of graphing (and by extension, economics).

There were two things the red shirt analysis brought to light for me. One is the recurring theme in marketing of testing raising more questions than answers. I find it very common to set up a test and have it raise additional questions that weren’t even considered in the first round. The other is “causation vs. correlation”, I think the last discussion I read on that was in Freakonomics, the fact that characteristics that a group of individuals have in common is not necessarily the reason they are grouped together. For example: yes, there were many red shirted crewmen that died, but that’s because the red shirt signifies the security team, people put in dangerous situations. There’s nothing inherently dangerous about a red shirt versus a blue one.

When causation is confused with correlation, this can lead to problems. In the past I have worked at organizations that would look at this data, ship some blue shirts to the security team, and declare victory.

Twitter invites keep coming in. I have a normal routine, I click through and see who the person is. Anybody with more followers than they are following is fine with me. If you are equal or have 100+ more, it depends on if I know or like you, a highly subjective test.

Then there are the Spitters (Spam Twitters) who are following 2,000 people and have 3 followers. Those go to the junk bin.

Until today.

I got an invite from 5min_tech,  and they follow 2,000 more than follow them. I was about to relegate them to the clearing at the end of the path, until I read the tweets:

How to boost firefox speed? How to buy a computer? How to make flaming logos in Photoshop?

All things that, when flowing through my river of tweets, I might be interested in. Or at least more interesting than “Watch a sock puppet endorse ooVoo. Seriously!”

They got by the rules and defenses by giving some value to the customer – let that marinate for a while (a la Clarence).