Monday, May 19th, 2008

Getting people’s attention

in: Communicate, Standing out

About a month ago, I wrote a piece on ways the Internet could die. It was an interesting experience: The story got Dugg, comments went through the roof, and lots of people decided to comment on it. At the same time, news sites picked it up, “summarized” it, and posted it. This in turn led to a new wave of traffic on those sites (and some slightly more thoughtful discussion than the initial Digg invective.)

The lessons from all this:

  • Bumper sticker headlines work
  • People click on Top Ten lists because they love order and structure
  • People complain about Top Ten lists because they’re often linkbait for Reddit
  • If you can work in enough topics, everyone will have an opinion

For a site like GigaOm, which is well respected, you can do this stuff from time to time. But you have to back it up with real content; in my (unscientific) experience, others are more likely to steal or linkjack a top ten list, and visitors are less likely to subscribe to the post.

And last of all, whatever your idea, Trey Parker and Matt Stone have done it already, only better.

Thanks to John Overton for that one.

View Comments

Tuesday, May 13th, 2008

Jumping the sticker shark

in: Communicate, Standing out, Startups

Notebook stickers are the badge of pride of many a Web 2.0 denizen. It’s unlikely that an IBM Thinkpad will be festooned with colorful logoes and strange sayings, but head to any campus and you’ll see that the back of a Mac is the new car bumper.

Stickers do more than profess your technical leanings. They’re a labor of love. And that love comes from having to work for them. In some cases, companies only hand out their stickers at special events. Or they make commemorative ones. There are blogs (like Stickergiant) devoted to Sticky Love. And some sites sell them if you weren’t able to attend their event, usually through self-publishing sites like Cafepress.

Once, stickers had street cred. But now, scruffy-haired basement entrepreneurs toting the requisite messenger bag troll from booth to booth, trying to grab a sticker without having to sit through a sales pitch. Still, there’s some effort involved.

A while back, Startup Schwag realized there was a currency in the stickers and T-shirts that are a kind of by-product of startup culture, and started sending out grab bags of stuff. The startup gets visibility; the subscriber gets momentary thought leadership; and Startup Schwag nets a cool $15.

yahoostick.jpgBut it’s definitely hitting mainstream. At Web2Expo in mid-May, Yahoo was giving out placemats of stickers, rather than individual ones.  Have they jumped the shark? Certainly, this is the challenge of Big Internet — how does one maintain the allure of secrecy, of being “in”, while still achieving the economies of scale that investors anticipated. To me, this sticker placemat is a metaphor for many of the challenges Yahoo faces.

Don’t get me wrong — I grabbed one of them. But it’s more to hide the fact that I have a cheap Acer, rather than a glowing Mac.

At least that’s what I keep telling myself.

Maybe I’ll go find some blog bumper stickers to make me feel better.

View Comments

Monday, May 12th, 2008

Should you choose an unusual name for your baby?

in: Communicate, Standing out

The US Federal Government announced recently that its terrorist watch list contained nearly 800,000 names.

Richard Reid, who tried to blow up an airplane in December, 2001, had a fairly common name. www.namestatistics.com says that Richard is the eighth most common name in the world; and Reid is the 232nd most common last name. According to www.yournotme.com, there are 227 people in the UK named Richard Reid. With those odds, people with a common name are increasingly likely to be mistaken for someone on the list.

Some people whose names are similar to those on the watch list—or are listed—have countered by putting search technologies to use in their defense. Hasan Elahi decided to put his whole life online when he was mistakenly added to the watch list.

I like my name (now that I’m out of grade school.) Alistair is pretty unusual, and there are only 2,500 people with my last name in North America. But I mostly like it because it’s unique. Today, we live in a searchable world. Once upon a time, a familiar name might have made an appealing name choice in the schoolyard. But today, uniqueness has its advantages.

For one thing, I don’t have to share my search results with others.

Read more…

View Comments
« Previous Page