Blog

I tried to get some online work done yesterday, but was surprised to find that the 50 mph gusts had knocked out powerlines in many areas, so I had a (welcome) surprise day off. 

We’ve been having trouble with our 8 year old, who’s a bright kid, but suffers with ADHD and doesn’t focus well. Of late, we’re getting a lot of math worksheets back and they’re not complete; it’s obvious she’s having problems with fundmentals. 

You see, somewhere along the line, the schools decided that learning addition and subtraction by rote wasn’t a good idea.  After all, what use could it be to be able to add or subtract basic numbers without thinking?

Well, that hasn’t exactly worked for Madison.  So we’re back at flash cards, which she’s willing to do – which is great because if she didn’t want to do it, didn’t want to succeed, we would surely fail.

I had a flash yesterday and packed both of them off to the bowling alley.  I made a game out of having them keep score, and they loved it.  “Mackenzie, how many did you leave standing?  Okay, then if there are ten pins, how many did you knock down?” Each girl kept score for herself and they both seemed to take pride in putting the math to work for them.  From now on, I’ll be looking for other ways to make math fun while getting them to work with the basics.

I spent most of the last week debugging things for IE 7 and generally changing the way most of the sites I’ve developed handle CSS (cascading style sheets).  To put it mildly, I am not an utterly happy Microsoft client today.  Let me share my pain.

Standards are standards, and we’ve had the approved spec for HTML and XHTML for sometime.  Is it too much to ask that IE 7 should work with existing standards-based code? 

(more…)

I’ve been thinking a lot about relevance in online marketing in the past day, since reading this statement from the D/C Strategic post I blogged yesterday: 

Whereas it was Survival of the Loudest. Now it is Survival of the Relevant.

Relevance is the buzzword du jour, but the case is well made in many places.  I thought I might add my voice to the fray.

(more…)

http://dc-strategic.com/?p=41

Domanic Canterbury at D/C Strategy takes his marketing seriously.  He’s got a great post about how marketing has changed and what you need to do to survive.  I won’t bother explaining, just go to his site and read.  If you really need a teaser:

In the new marketing landscape you can’t just relentlessly tell people you’re better.  Instead, be better and you will find the growth you seek.

Maureen Rogers has an excellent post on OpinonatedMarketers.com entitled: “Words of Wisdom from Seth Godin” which features his awesome “Top 10 Secrets of the Marketing Process.”

Seth’s 10 points are excellent – they generally boil down to having utter conviction in your campaign and being willing to put yourself fully behind it.  His point #8 is a true classic:

8. Compromise in marketing is almost always a bad idea. Extreme A could work. Extreme B could work. The average of A and B will almost never work.

(more…)

What’s the difference between a quote and outright theft of intellectual property?  Well, as a blogger, I worry I’ll miss an attribution.  The problem is, there are blogs out there that don’t take things nearly as seriously. 

Case in point:  Read this article by Al Lautenslager- 10 Marketing Tactics Under $10 and published online at Entrepeneur.com with the following clearly displayed: “Copyright © 2006 Entrepreneur.com, Inc. All rights reserved.”  Then go to this site (link removed, the owner removed the post quickly as requested), which popped up in a Technorati search this morning.  As I was reading it, I couldn’t help but think “I’ve read this before…”

At the bottom, the fine print:

(more…)

Eric Kintz from HP has started a group post for online marketers called “Open Post to All Marketers – Why Blogging Matters” which has been picked up by David Churbuck here, Peter Blackshaw here,  Dan Greenfield here, David Armano here, and Will Waugh here.

Why should we read? HP, Lenovo, Nielsen, Earthlink, Digitas and ANA – a worth collection of companies, and a talented group of new marketers.  Here’s the topic list that’s been covered:

#1 – PR and Blogging – A Love Story or Peaceful Coexistence
#2 – Blogging and the “new influencers”
#3 – The role of blogging in the changing world of advertising
#4 – The role of blogging as part of an integrated web strategy
#5 – Drive Harmony in Conversational Touchpoints
#6 – Creativity, Innovation + Blogging

I’ll add my own topic: Niche Traffic

(more…)

Steve Rubel had another great post on Micro Persuasion about the Internation Herald Tribune offering customized text to speech podcasts – a logical extension to my mind of their “clippings” service.  Steve’s observation, which I completely agree with:

The International Herald Tribune recently launched a feature I wish every newspaper would offer. They enable readers to create a custom text-to-speech podcast with the stories of their choosing. NXP semiconductors has signed on as the initial sponsor of the service, which is powered by Readspeaker.

John Dodd of Make Marketing History posted today what has to be one of the best lists of New Marketing does and don’ts that I’ve seen.  A quick sample of his top ten:

7) Technical Support is marketing.
In the absence of all of the above, your users inevitably need help. A technical support department speaking in non-technical, hand-holding language transforms their purchase from waste of money to life-enhancing boon and is the greatest marketing tool you have.

(more…)

I posted last week on AssistingYourSmallBusiness.com that blogs can be excellent traffic builders for sites.  Today, Steve Rubel at Micro Persuasion had a post about Google starting to move to integrate blog search into Google News.  If that’s the case, it will give blog owners a chance to drink from the same hose that often brings the big sites to their knees – and for the smaller site owners it can give you an excellent opportunity to use your monthly bandwidth allotment in one fell swoop.

Google has made a small, but important change to Google News. On the top right hand part of the page next to the Archive Search there’s now a link to Google Blog Search. Is Google one step closer to integrating the two products? They already do on Google Finance. News and blogs seem even more like a natural fit.

I wouldn’t be overly concerned though – one has to assume they’ll use an index of popularity and traffic ratings to keep obscure sites from hitting the homepage of Google news.