Jeff Hester

Poking around the intersection of KM and Social Media

Archives for November 2005

No Blogs Next Year

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I ran across an interesting article on the ClickZ Network by Gary Stein titled “No Blogs Next Year.” In the article, Stein describes his experience at the recent ad:tech panel he chaired earlier this month about advertising with blogs. He asked Phil Kaplan (of F*ckedCompany.com fame) what he thought of the blog phenomenon. Kaplan’s response tells it all. “In my day,” he said “we called them web sites.”

Clearly “blogs” are just a content management and publishing technology and nothing more. What you do with a blog (or any other CMS) is where the value lies.

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Happy Thankgiving (for Engineers)

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For the first time in many years, we’re not hosting Thanksgiving dinner. I’ll be traveling to my brother-in-law’s home in Fallbrook my fill of turkey, football and family.

I know that many of you are engineers (or think an engineer), so I’ll offer help for today’s culinary projects: Michael Chu’s Cooking for Engineers. Chu is a hardware application engineer for a semiconductor manufacturer who brings an analytical touch to the kitchen.

You might think Cooking for Engineers is just a gimmick, but Chu takes it very seriously. He even features a patent-pending tabular recipe card format that actually makes pretty good sense to me.

I’m going to try the Garlic Mashed Potatoes.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Web 2.0 and the future of website design

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There has been a lot of buzz around Web 2.0. The idea is that the old Internet companies (ostensibly Web 1.0) were built on a model that did not last. When the dot-com bubble burst in 2000, many of those companies could not adapt or survive. So what is Web 2.0? Tim O’Reilly describes Web 2.0 as a set of principles and practices that includes:

  • The perpetual beta
  • Software that gets better the more people use it
  • Hackability (Google Maps)
  • Participation, not publishing (blogs)
  • Tagging, not taxonomy (del.icio.us; Flickr)
  • Radical trust (Wikipedia)
  • Emergent
  • Rich user interface (AJAX)
  • Small pieces loosely joined

So what does the Web 2.0 look like? I took screenshots from a series of websites consider part of the Web 2.0 crowd to look at their design in search of a common thread.

Web 2.0

What did I find?

  • Lots of white and grey. Most of the sites used a white background with little splashes of bright colors for some text.
  • Lots of Arial. Most of the sites used Arial. Is it just me, or does Arial feel like 1970’s Helvetica signage?
  • Very light on the images. Mainly text-based interfaces.
  • Most advertising is text-based (i.e. Adsense)
  • Greater emphasis on social interaction (sharing, syndication, comments, trackbacks, etc.)

When I contrast the design and function of these “next-generation” websites with my own, there’s a huge difference. Is it time for a network-wide refresh?

What do you like/dislike about this new breed of websites?

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SF Food Porn

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This Flickr Photoweek, business took me to our San Francisco office at Oyster Point to share a presentation on practical ways of integrating knowledge management into your daily work process. San Francisco is one of my favorite cities — it’s got a great vibe, it’s easy to walk around and there are incredible cultural opportunities. Since next week is my mom’s birthday, I took her and Christopher to one of her favorite places, a French restaurant called the Chez Papa Bistrot.

It’s an intimate place withFlickr Photo a few tables on the sidewalk, evoking memories of the cafes in Paris. But the food was sublime. The prosciutto wrapped artichokes stuffed with goat cheese made you close your eyes and go “mmmm…” Mom started with her favorite, the potatoe, asparagus and artichoke salad with shaved parmesan and bacon. And the filet mignon with potato-parsnip gratin and truffle foie gras sauce melted in my mouth. It was a very happy birthday dinner.

Chez Papa is located on Potrero Hill and reservations are a must.

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Jake Ludington – Upgrading your Subscribers

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Jake Ludington works with Chris Pirillo on Lockergnome and also has his own site, MediaBlab. He has an email newsletter with about 50,000 subscribers, and recently introduced a premium subscription for $30/year. About 1,000 people upgraded to the premium subscription, converting to about $30,000/year that he didn’t have before. Not bad.

Before you can even consider a premium subscription, you need a subscriber base of at least 5,000. So how do you build an audience?

  1. Make your podcast search engine friendly. Have a web site with show notes and other material. It’s much more searchable.
  2. Create an email list. Notify subscribers each time a new podcast is published. Email drives action.
  3. Press releases are a great tool, not for every podcast, but maybe if you interview someone notable.
  4. Subscribe to your podcast. Add your podcast to all the big directories, and subscribe to it through them.
  5. Tag your text. Use Technorati style tags (rel=”podcasting”)
  6. Social bookmarking. Use del.icio.us and IceRocket — add your own content to del.icio.us and tag it for discovery.
  7. Interview interesting people (duh)
  8. Comment on other podcasts and blogs
  9. Guest blog on other sites
  10. Affiliate with a network. Remember that people still use text-based search, even to find podcasts (yes, the podcast directories suck).
  11. Get listed in directories

Build relationships with your listeners

  1. Have a voicemail line for feedback. K7.net offers free voicemail, Skype or Gizmo Project also can work, but with an external phone number to reach the non-geeks.
  2. Email feedback.
  3. Giveaways. Ask for free stuff to giveaway from companies who might want to reach your audience.
  4. Care about production quality. Normalize the audio. Jake prefers using an Edirol R1 audio recorder, which has a limiter that actually works (eliminating background noise).
  5. Value listener time. Don’t meander or ramble with worthless junk.

The bottom line? Add value. Offer something worth paying for.

Trivia tidbit – The Chris Pirillo Show nets well into six figures using a sponsorship model (Microsoft Windows Media sponsors their show).

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Gratifying Moment of the Day

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Chris Pirillo in motionSat in on a session on branding led by Chris Pirillo of Lockergnome fame. Chris does some fantastic things on the web, not only with Lockergnome, but also his podcast, his own blog, the e-books, the Gnomedex conference… the list goes on. The most gratifying moment of the morning was introducing myself and exchanging business cards after the session, and Chris exclaiming in his usual exhuberant manner “I know you! You do the instant messaging stuff.” Chris, I’ll be talking to you about that editor thing.

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Phillip Torrone on Podcasting

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Torrone came to fame working at Engadget.com producting great how-to’s. He now works at MakeZine.com which is sort of like the old Popular Mechanics but for the modern age. His podcast for Make uses low-end, accessible solutions (just what I’m looking for!). He used to use Skype (which I love) but now uses Gizmo Project because it makes recording brainlessly simple. Which makes me wonder… why doesn’t Skype incorporate recording? Seems like a no-brainer. Good stuff.

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