Better Marketing Skills

I've really been enjoying reading Made to Stick. Even though I think I am a decent communicator, I often don't feel like I get my point across, or provide a compelling "call to action" for whoever happens to be listening. This is a great argument for becoming a better marketer:

"Virtually all economic growth (in the world) was due to technological progress. I think as a society we're not really paying attention to that," Page said. "Science has a real marketing problem. If all the growth in world is due to science and technology and no one pays attention to you, then you have a serious marketing problem."

Google's Page urges scientists to market themselves | CNET News.com

technorati tags:marketing, attention

Startup Quote

I heard a great quote from Dan Shapiro, CEO of Ontela the other day: "Startups usually die out of Indigestion rather than starvation".

technorati tags:quotes, startups

Converting your Car to Ethanol

After a friend bragged about his neighbor converting his car to run on Ethanol for around $100, I figured I better investigate. While it Ethanol is on its way, my conclusion was that it isn't time to go out and mod the Subaru and risk ruining the engine just yet.

The city of Portland, Oregon will require E85 and biodiesel at all gas pumps instead of their petroleum equivalents by 2009. Details of how this will work for individual vehicle owners while maintaining automobile manufacturer warranties, despite exceeding the manufacturer's maximum warranted operation percentage of 10% of ethanol in fuel, are still being worked as of late-2005.

E85 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

technorati tags:ethanol, alternativeenergy

Go Dare

Funny how "tagging" is already starting to sound so 2005 ;).

Personally, I've gotten tired of attending conferences where we heard more about technologies and sites that the homogenous demographic of young to middle aged, white, male computer geeks find interesting (e.g. del.icio.us and tagging) and less about what Web users actually use regularly or find interesting (hint: it isn't del.icio.us and it sure as fuck isn't tagging).

Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life - Entropy in Tagging Systems, Google's Office Killer and Conference Diversity

technorati tags:tagging

Capitol Hill Seattle

If you live on Capitol Hill, and you aren't checking out this blog, you are missing out:

Close to home, one local blog has garnered considerable attention in the year its been online. Capitol Hill Seattle, the creation of Justin Carder and his wife Kristin Boraas, has attracted a growing crowd of loyalists. Featuring a whimsical take on life on the Hill, the blog gets between 150 and 200 hits a day.

Pacific Publishing Company - Local blog gains attention, momentum

technorati tags:seattle, capitolhill, blogging

Virtual Currency Attached to Email

I always wanted to do something like this to attach real currency to an email request using HelpShare. However, when I read this product description this really sounds like a solution in search of a problem.

Attent™ with Serios™ is an enterprise productivity application inspired by multiplayer online games. It tackles the problem of information overload in corporate email using psychological and economic principles from successful games. Attent creates a synthetic economy with a currency (Serios) that enables users to attach value to an outgoing email to signal importance.

Seriosity: Products

technorati tags:helpshare, email

Bootstrapping the Semantic Web

We're getting closer to the Semantic Web. The problem is that we as Web users, application writers, and standards writers have failed miserably to come up with and adopt a distributed solution to the problem. It is starting to look more like private enterprise is going to solve this problem. if this is the case, the interesting question to me (more interesting than solving the problem) is how one company will establish themselves as the organizing body for the world's semantic information.

Google has the momentum to accomplish this (despite missing the boat earlier with Google base); I would be shocked if there weren't internal Google Semantic Web projects. Otherwise, open APIs and an open collective database are a good start, but what is the use case that makes every application want to jump on board, reference that database, and share their structure?

Tangentially relevant:

This is the true Web 2.0 way: don't ask users to provide structure, unless it's useful to them. But do design your applications in such a way that structure is generated without extra effort on the user's part. And mine structure that already exists, even if it's messy and inefficient.

O'Reilly Radar > Different Approaches to the Semantic Web

technorati tags:semanticweb, google, freebase, orgtag

UGC - Uninspired Gutless Cop-out

I hate the term "User Generated Content" because to me it has come to imply an exploitive entrepreneurial mindset. Namely, profiting from your "users" work rather than empowering and enabling them. The term is valid and probably shouldn't carry that connotation (Wikipedia and YouTube are ineed UGC sites) - but I still don't like it. "Building community" is another useless phrase for me. These days, I'm all about finding communities to serve. With those caveats, here are some tips (from the CEO of Judy's Book) on what types of interests or vertical markets can make for good Web audiences:

I have a friend who is starting a UGC / social network site in the health space and he asked me to send him an email with my lessons learned from Judy's Book. I'll post it here for you all to read and comment on. Keith, Here's my advice... 1) Focus, focus, focus Focus the network on a specific category. Health is way too broad. At Judy's Book, I wish we had just focused on restaurants. And for that matter, we should have started with Seattle restaurants. Restaurants as a category are the area where there is the intersection of consumer passion, review writing, and daily activity.

A Sack of Seattle: Tip 1 for creating a user generated content site

technorati tags:ugc, community