It Has to Be Quality

I was reading an article over at TechCrunch, Could Microsoft Knock Off Yahoo To Become Google’s Biggest Competitor?, and it wasn’t the main story that caught my attention, but something in the second paragraph:

Despite a $100 million Crispin, Porter + Bogusky advertising campaign, Ask saw its share of the search market decrease from 3.5% to 3.3%, although to be fair to Ask, Compete recorded a 2.6% rise in traffic.

This just proves that advertising will only get you so far – you still have to have a product that works well. There’s thousands of sites and applications on the web that are hugely successful that don’t have advertising budgets. $100 million is a lot of money if your marketshare went up 3% and is depressing if your marketshare actually went down.

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Quality

Write Articles, Not Blog Postings – From Jakob Nielsen:

You should also focus on material that lower-ranked content contributors can’t easily create in their spare time.

I can split hairs over the details of this article and whether I agree with all of Nielsen’s points, but I agree with his overall message. Regardless of whether you are a true business or just someone who blogs, it’s important to follow this advice and post quality content. This doesn’t mean that when a new product comes out you shouldn’t follow the bandwagon and blog about it – but if you do decide to, make sure you’re saying something meaningful. This might mean pointing out ideas that all the other bloggers have missed on a particular topic.
I have recently pulled back on a lot of the Apple-related news I post on this site because I realized that posts and articles at Daring Fireball said what I wanted to say – but did it more clearly and intelligently. So why should I waste my time? Instead, I should focus on creating my own meaningful content.
Jon Gruber at Daring Fireball understands the importance of quality writing because that is his job. He is a fulltime blogger. This might sound funny to some people (like my parents) but he’s very careful when he writes and what he writes about. He also does not have comments enabled on his site – this is one of the keys to his site’s success.
In the end though, if you do have a blog, you use it because you like to write. I started this site because I’m a web designer, and writing on this site is my daily exercise for my brain. I don’t get paid for this site, but that doesn’t mean I should post shitty entries.

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Links For Today 7.9.2007

RIM’s CEO sees iPhone as “dangerous” – Of course he does. Duh.
MacNN: AT&T survey hints at iChat on iPhone? – I hate speculation, but this is the only thing stopping me from buying the iPhone. We all can see the empty bottom rows on the iPhone menu screen, we know Apple will keep releasing new functionality every few months, slowly driving the stake further into other mobile companies’ chests.
The iPhone Threat to Adobe, Microsoft, Sun, Real, BREW, Symbian (via Daring Fireball) – I see no need to have Flash or Java on the iPhone. There are tons of MP3 players with many more features that the iPod, but who’s #1? Less is more people, less is more.
Survey: Windows loses ground with developers – “Linux gaining share as the number of developers targeting Windows falls 12 percent, Evans Data says”
CEOs Must Be Designers, Not Just Hire Them. (via kottke) – Heed to design people. Heed!
Andy Rutledge: Quiet Structure

Quiet structure is achieved when you de–emphasize the structural elements; the containing boxes, structural lines, bullets, structural color elements, etc… and bring a rhythmical consistency to the layout. The result is that the content becomes more conspicuous and the overall clarity of presentation is greatly enhanced.

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Built to Spill

Last night my wife, a few friends and I saw a great show with Cat Power and Built to Spill at McCarren Park in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. On our walk up Bedford Avenue, some girl had the audacity to ask me if Built to Spill was opening for Cat Power. Silly girl, bite your tongue, more like the other way around.
BTS played a great show, and it seemed like they wanted to stay on longer but saw them get the ‘ten minutes left’ signal from some dude on the side of the stage. Oh well.
photo: Built to Spill, McCarren Park Pool, 7 July 2007

Built to Spill, McCarren Park Pool, 7 July 2007

photo: Doug Martsch of Built to Spill, McCarren Park Pool, 7 July 2007

Doug Martsch of Built to Spill, McCarren Park Pool, 7 July 2007

Maybe it’s because I’m getting old and more conservative, but the whole venue felt like the South Park episode where Cartman has to stop the Hippie Jam Fest in town. Just the whole dynamic of a few motivated speakers trying to rally a crowd – half of which are baked out of their minds.
South Park - Die Hippies Die
FYI – There’s a bunch of great footage of BTS on YouTube.

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Music

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AT&T Cool Through the Associative Property

Ars Technica: Let a million iPhones bloom – great article.
Here’s a piece:

Well that very same AT&T in that same market just got probably half a million new two-year contracts in three days. Now I don’t know what AT&T’s usual acquisition numbers are like, but I have to think there are some big smiles in the boardroom right about now.
And that’s amusing because AT&T has almost nothing to be happy about. Those smiling executives are probably already starting to convince themselves that they’re responsible in some way for this success. That sentiment is about as well founded as the power company patting itself on the back as big-screen TVs fly off the shelves.

If anything, AT&T’s douchey-ness was amplified next to Apple. All the complaints I’ve heard thus far about the iPhone have all been about AT&T technical issues and bad customer service.

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The Power of Playlists

I’ve been meaning to write about this for a while, even before the complaints started about the iPhone having only 8 gigs of disk space.
There are some people that seem to have the impression that they need to load their digital music device with as much of their entire music collection as possible. I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve guilty of this in the past. “I like Talib Kweli, I’ll just load all his albums onto my iPod…”
There’s nothing wrong with this behavior, but if you’re like me, and you have your device set to SHUFFLE ALL, you notice that you spend a lot of time clicking the Forward button over and over and over until you hit a track you want.
A better route to take is to create playlists in iTunes. It might be a little time consuming, but it will be well worth your while in the long run. As much as you love the Led Zeppelin II album, you know damn well you were through with Stairway to Heaven by junior year in high school ….so why are carrying that track around on your iPod?
A first stab at creating Playlists is obviously ‘old favorites’. This is a good start and will work for some people.
Another good list that I like to make is New Albums. This takes the old mentality of ‘dumping’ albums on your device, but in this case, it’s just to sift out the tracks you like and don’t like. Once I realized what tracks I liked from The White Stripes new album, Icky Thump, I just kept those and deleted the rest.
One of the most helpful techniques for getting solid listening experience from your iPod is deleting the tracks you don’t like. Tell me if this has ever happened to you (over and over): when your iPod is set on shuffle, it seems to like to shuffle the same songs every time, and they’re the songs you always don’t want to hear.
Well, the first step to happiness is removing those tracks from your iPod. The shuffling might begin to find great tracks, or it might find more crappy ones. Just repeat the above process until you’ve chipped away the all the unwanted tracks.
ALthough this is essential to owners of iPhones and other players with smaller capacity, it’s equally powerful for 60 gig iPod owners too.
It’s about quality people, not quantity.

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HBO Voyeur

screengrab: HBO Voyeur
HBO Voyeur – This is great site and the quality of the video clips is amazing – super crisp!
It reminds me of the Tram ride I take from 60th Street & 2nd Ave to Roosevelt Island (where my wife and I live). When we take the Tram you get a bird’s eye view hundreds of apartments. Unfortunately, the ride is too quick to see anything spicy. 🙁

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AOL Video = YouTube

screenshot: AOL Video
So I stumbled upon AOL Video for the first time tonight and I noticed something interesting – all the videos I clicked on are from YouTube! Is there anything wrong with this? Absolutely not. I guess I just expect this sort of decision from an amateur – not from an established (and outdated) company like AOL. I guess they must have some amazing editorial skills for extracting video ‘gold’ from YouTube to make themselves a profit. (update: It looks as though their premium video content that they sell is in Windows Media format, and it doesn’t seem to play nice with my Mac.)
I guess they’re running out of ideas, I mean shit, they did rip of Yahoo with their beta site redesign. See below…

Continue…

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