Posts filed under 'Main'
In an effort to try to boost failing state economies, many states are starting to look for legal loopholes that would allow them to tax online purchases. Take Rhode Island and North Carolina for example. Frustrated with not being able to tax Amazon.com purchases, the states introduced legislation that would count all affiliates as “employees.”
That means all the people who post links to Amazon products and get paid a small fee if somebody clicks that link and buys something would all be “amazon employees” for tax purposes. Why is that important? Counting them as employees means that Amazon has a physical presence in the state, thus could be assessed a state sales tax.
So how did Amazon respond? They said “fine, we’re closing our affiliate program in Rhode Island and North Carolina.” End of problem.
I’m sure that led to thousands of pissed off Amazon affiliates who must now find other ways to monetize their blogs and websites. Hopefully these people will direct their anger toward their state legislation and not toward Amazon.
From my perspective, Amazon did the only thing it could. Re-coding their site, setting up tax collection infrastructure, hiring the necessary people, and paying the taxes would have been a monstrous undertaking - one most likely comparable to or greater than the losses they’d see from ditching the affiliates. Then there’s the legal precedent set by complying with this legislation that would open the doors to all states to do similar. Then, Amazon is screwed.
I just wish more companies would have the balls to pull this. When South Carolina raised a stink about Craigslist, the site removed its erotic services postings. Part of me wishes that they would have said “fine, we’re blocking all South Carolina traffic.”
When news sites threaten to sue Google or just plain bitch, I’d love to see Google say “fine, we’re taking your news site out of our index.”
If more companies started following Amazon’s lead, eventually legislators would come to realize just how stupid they are. If they didn’t, I’m sure their constituents would surely tell them.
July 1st, 2009
If you’ve just recently updated your iPhone to version 3.0 of the iPhone software you may have noticed that the apple Tunes remote application has stopped working. When I updated, attempting to open the remote application would instantly cause it to crash. I quickly looked to see if there was an update, and there wasn’t.
A quick search of forums, blogs, and twitter shows that a few other people are having the same problem.
Good news, there is an update available, except it’s not marked as an update.
Here’s how to make your iPhone remote application work:
Load up the app store on the iPhone and search for remote. You’ll see the exact same application you have installed. Click the “install” to re-download it and you’ll get a popup saying you already have this application. Tap yes to install it anyway.
That’s all there is to it. The remote application should work as normal now.
June 26th, 2009
Scoble and I started a discussion this morning about how a majority of twitter followers are useless (and about how Robert has a big ego.) Scoble’s ego, the echo chamber, and how people in the valley live in their own world is a topic I’d love to discuss, but for now I’d like to concentrate on Twitter, useless followers, bots, and twitter engagement.
The Background
Scoble’s initial comments were relating to how despite having a metric shit-ton of followers, only a small percentage of those followers actually engage in conversations on friendfeed (and I’m guessing even less than that reply to his tweets. Scoble, got any statistics for us?) It’s a common phenomenon happening all over twitter. A majority of people following any given account really don’t react, interact, converse, or otherwise get involved in the conversation.
So Why is that?
There’s a few different scenarios I’d like to discuss. Sure there’s the people who created Twitter accounts, Tweeted their obligatory “I don’t see what the hype is about” and then quickly left the service. For a majority of people, this is the case. With the most common non-article words on twitter being things like “Watching”, “trying”, “listening”, “reading” and “eating”, it’s easy to see how boring most tweets are. It’s hard to even pretend to care what somebody is eating or listening to. If that’s all my tweeple were tweeting about I’d leave too.
Some of these people simply may not know about twitter tools like tweetdeck which make it easy to stay up to date on Twitter without having to constantly reload the website.
It would be really neat if Twitter could show me some sort of “active followers” instead of total followers. I’d be willing to bet that it’s somewhere around 30%
There’s bigger issues here
There’s much bigger issues than people who’ve lost interest in Twitter. Many of the issues revolve around follower count. I’ve always believe that any service that counts “friends”, “subscribers”, or “followers” is nothing but an online popularity contest. As I mentioned in 2005 the problem is that people will “Friend”, “subscribe to” or “follow” almost anybody because they know that the other person will “friend”, “subscribe”, or “follow” back.
For some reason it’s become common courtesy to re-follow everybody who follows us. Why? I’ve got many followers who I don’t follow back because I simply don’t find them interesting. Scoble takes a different approach - he follows everybody then selectively unfollows those who aren’t interesting. Until Twitter implements commands so I can type “unfollow XXX” that approach just seems like it will take way too much time.
By automatically re-following everybody that follows us we’re simply stroking their ego and increasing their e-penis size. Just like on MySpace and Facebook, Twitter has become a competition to gather the most followers.
Whey does epenis follower size matter?
Follower size matters because Twitter users will click anything. Earlier today I posted a tweet that said “Testing to see how many people will blindly click this: ” and put in a shortened URL. Within 30 seconds I had 16 clicks on that link - and it grew steadily throughout the day. Now I only have around 150 followers, so that’s a pretty good percentage. It’s a much higher ratio than an email campaign or adwords ad and it costs infinitely less.
Are URL shorteners the problem?
Part of the problem has to do with how we’ve come to use URL shortening services. In an e-mail, or on a website users are presented with an actual URL that tells them something about where it leads. The URL is important - if only at a subliminal level. Why do you think Google includes it in all of their ads? It’s helpful to the user (@google, a study on clicking ads with/without URLs would be cool.)
On Twitter, users simply see something like http://su.pr/AOco7l (you probably don’t want to click that.) Where I’d normally make a decision based on where the link leads on a website, I can’t do that on Twitter - so I click just to see where it takes me.
And that’s where bots come in
And that’s why bots are profitable and won’t go away. As long as people automatically re-follow each other and blindly click on links, it will make sense for people to use twitter bots to gather as many followers as possible. The bots aren’t going away, if anything they’re just going to become more prevalent until we change our ways. The best way to fix this? Simply stop automatically re following everybody that follows us. It’s about time we start creating an #unfollowsaturday to “follow” #followfriday.
June 22nd, 2009
There’s a ton of fear mongering going on right now in the blogosphere about the FTC’s plans to monitor blogs for claims. A lot of bloggers are worried about what this ruling might mean for them and fearful that it could harm the industry.
I don’t think there’s anything to worry about here. If anything, this can only help the plight of many bloggers. While the article above does a great job of adding flames to the fear, it also links to the official .pdf that does a much better job of explaining things.
Quite simply, if we bloggers want to be taken as seriously as newspaper journalists we need to start following the same rules and guidelines. That doesn’t mean we all need to rush out and buy an AP style guide (although I do reccomend it) - but it does mean that I would have needed to say something if I posted an affiliate link there to Amazon. (I didn’t)
Regular banner ads are fine, the FTC is more concerned with the content of actual blog posts. That means the shady practice of paid posts without disclosure is something to worry about.
If you’re accepting free products then blogging about how awesome they are, you should worry. If you went out and bought yourself a new widget and felt like sharing how cool it is, you’re fine.
If you work at a company and blog about that company, you should disclose it. If you just really like Google and want to blog about them, that’s not a problem.
The FTC regulations are really pretty simple. If you ever find yourself asking “should I disclose this?” then the answer is yes. That’s about all there is to it. As a blogger who doesn’t do paid posts or accept free gifts, I have no problem here. Since I often blog about industry related events, I usually do a good job of letting people know where I work and what thoughts are mine vs my employer’s.
If you’re truly in doubt of what you should do, simply don’t do paid reviews or posts and don’t accept freebies. If you do, talk about it. Other than that, put up a page about yourself saying where you work and have worked, and say that the opinions on the blog are yours and not your employers (if that’s the case.)
Other than that, I think the FTC regulations are a good step in the right direction toward leveling the journalism playing field.
June 22nd, 2009
Online quizzes have always fascinated me - mainly in the sense that so many people take them and actually rely on them to answer more serious questions in their life. It seems like you can find an online quiz for almost anything now. So, with that said, I’ve created a few more fun ones to add to the mix. Go ahead, check them out.
My Online Quizzes:
The Am I Gay quiz - the only definite way to know.
Not sure if that guy likes you? Find out with the does he like me quiz.
Then, if he does and all goes well, you may need my am I pregnant quiz.
And, of course there’s always my Internet slang quiz to test your knowledge of web slang and acronyms. If you pass that one, there’s also a part 2.
So there you go, get your quiz on!
June 19th, 2009
A common example talked about in most marketing curriculums is what we call the sesame seed problem. It’s what happens when businessmen try too hard to cut costs without focusing on the real issue.
Fast food buns come with sesame seeds on them. Every few years some genius MBA will get an idea like “if we remove 2 seeds from the bun, nobody will notice and we’ll save $x.xx in production costs.” A few years later somebody gets the same idea and removes more seeds. Another few years, another few seeds until eventually you’re left serving hamburgers on seedless buns.
All of the ‘non-noticeable’ changes suddenly turned into a very noticeable change that affects product quality.
The same thing is happening with the airlines right now. First, it was the story about airlines removing life jackets from airplanes. Now we’re hearing about airlines shaving fractions of centimeters off of cutlery to save fuel costs.
Seriously? Who came up with the “shave the spoons” idea. And why didn’t he just make them plastic, or out of a lighter material?
If you want to cut fuel costs, stop scrimping on stupid ideas and start doing something significant to address the problem. Hell, fire the guy that came up with the “shave the spoons” idea and you’ve just saved enough fuel to go cross country a few times.
So what should the airlines do?
Eliminate drink service on 45 min flights. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve taken a flight from Detroit to Chicago and been needlessly served a drink for a short flight. Most of the time I couldn’t even finish my soda before they were coming around to collect it.
Cans of pop weigh a ton. So do the carts that carry all of it. If you eliminated drink service you could not only get rid of all the weight from the pop cans and carts, but you could remove one whole stewardess from the plane. The savings would be astronomical.
I know, I know, what about people who want a drink? Simple: Install a vending machine for 20oz bottles at the entrance to the gate and let me bring it on. This will make more money from the vending machine revenues as well as cut down on spills since all drinks will now be in bottles with re-sealable caps on them.
The barf bags are another opportunity. We don’t need one in every seat. Instead, keep a supply in the stewardess section and have them give one to people upon request. If you think you might get sick, request one as you’re boarding the plane. Since most people just use these to dispose of their gum before they get their free soda, I can only assume that a metric shit-ton of these bags get wasted every day.
Replacing overhead bin doors with a flexible net like material instead of a hard plastic door would eliminate a few hundred pounds while also increasing storage space and accessibility (think no more opening and closing bins to see if it’s full.)
When it comes to the small stuff like spoons and life jackets though, I’ll gladly pay an extra $5 ticket price for the feeling of security that having a life jacket gives me. I know that statistically I’ll probably never need it (or survive the crash to be able to put it on) but if that 0.0001% chance ever happens, that life jacket is going to be a hell of a lot more useful than my can of diet Shasta.
June 9th, 2009
Starting Monday I will be selling advertising on the AllSlang family of websites.
The main site in this group is NoSlang.com.
Ads are available on the homepage, as well as site wide and will be accepted in text and banner format.
CPM rates range from $0.35 to $1.00 depending on placement, site, and number of impressions you’d like to buy.
NoSlang’s traffic is 60% female, and evenly split between teens and parents of teens.
Advertising space is also available on TranslateBritish.com, NoSwearing.com, and WoWSlang.com.
If you’re interested, please send an email to Ryan at NoSlang.com and we’ll set up a campaign for you.
June 5th, 2009
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