Jeff GravesHow to Attract MORE TRAFFIC!
Nope, I’m not the genius here, it’s Seth Godin, uber-marketing guru and all-around great thinker…Check out his Squidoo lens on increasing your website traffic.
One of the things that I find fascinating about publishing a blog, is the way that people come across your posts. While I started this blog as “scratch pad” for my ideas around starting a business, I also wanted to use it as a learning experience. And, learning how to build an audience and attract traffic is certainly a worthwhile undertaking. My one caveat, is that I want to do it while publishing posts that matter to ME. I don’t intend to start blogging about Paris Hilton or Lindsay Lohan here, or writing sordid tell-alls about my past romantic conquests, even though that might attract a certain audience. (OK, maybe the sordid (NOT!) details of my romantic escapades probably WON’T be a big draw).
But, I might just try a few things as experiments…maybe I already have, no?
zefrank Rules!
I’m a relative newbie to the world of zefrank, but I follow the show religiously…well, I watch every show, even if it means watching the whole weeks installments late on Friday night, or in this case, on a Tuesday night after the weekend away.
I have to say, yesterday’s show was absolutely, by far, the funniest thing I’ve seen, not just on the zefrank show, but on any show, movie or standup routine, in a long, long time. I DARE you to watch this and NOT break out laughing. My sides still hurt from this, and I’ve watched it 3 times already. I might even watch it again, right now!
I’m Baaackkk!
Well, after a much needed long weekend away, camping in the wilds of New Hampshire (OK, maybe not the WILDS, but at least I was away from TV, Wifi and my laptop), I’ve returned. Of course, I’m paying for my weekend of recreation by fighting off a pending cold, but I guess that’s not surprising given the time of year.
I’m catching up on my blog reading, and should return to posting shortly.
The Endless River
Renee Blodgett wrote an interesting post about our abundance of choice here in the developed world, and in the United States in particular. Who hasn’t gone into a grocery “super-store” and been overwhelmed with the number of different kinds of toothpaste, or soup, or ketchup (catsup) even, displayed on the shelves.
I’m beginning to feel that way about the endless number of choices online. The more I discover, the more I realize that there are many, many options out there that I have yet to explore. I’d love to spend more time exploring Second Life, but I just don’t have the time. I’d love to watch more crazy cool videos on YouTube, but I just don’t have the time. I’d love to play around with Myspace, or Friendster, or LinkedIn, and discover first hand the power of social networking sites, but I just don’t have the time.
And, I’d love to spend more time on this blog, posting, learning about trackbacks and pings, maybe even experimenting with ways to build an audience of interested readers…but so far, I just don’t have the time. Unless, of course, I can find a way to survive on less than 6 hours of sleep a night. 
A Look Outside
Last week, Seth Godin wrote an interesting post about how many people DON’T “get” a lot of things that many people really take for granted. As someone who relies on RSS feeds daily for the majority of my news and a good portion of my entertainment, it was somewhat eye-opening to see that only 12% of Internet users have even HEARD of RSS. And that 90% of the people in France have not yet created a blog.
While Seth points out that all of this means that there are huge untapped opportunities for enterprising people, i’m struck by the fact it’s so easy to get wrapped up in what YOU KNOW, and assume that everyone else knows what you know, too. I work in a group of smart, motivated people who are focused on building web applications. Yet, based on a purely unscientific poll I’ve taken over the last several weeks, there do not appear to be anyone among my 20 close peers who read technology blogs on a regular basis. This was shocking to me, until I realized that many of them are regular Netflix customers, and regularly have discussions on shows and movies that I have no clue about. To them, I’m the person that falls outside of their world. Neither world is “right” or “wrong”, but we need to realize that there are a lot of “worlds” out there, and that our little universe isn’t alone.
More Second Life Issues
Aimee Weber has a well-done post today on the Second Life Insider, asking Linden Labs to focus the next couple of months worth of updates on creating a stable, bug-free environment. I couldn’t agree more. For someone like me, who’s trying to build out a business in SL, each outage is frustrating and represents time lost in an already compromised project plan. For someone like Aimee, or the Sheep, this time out represents actual lost revenue. If the Lindens want the SL platform to truly be a engine for future growth on the Internet, these availability issues have got to get resolved. Every outage is going to make a lot of potential customers think twice before committing their brand image to an in-world project.
Oh, and I’m quite certain that the Lindens already know this – I’m not pretending to be offering up some amazing new revelation. I also understand that updating a complex piece of software like SL is not like changing a few lines in a COBOL program that calculates bank balances. It’s just really frustrating, standing on the outside as a resident, to be unable to get in-world and do what I want to do.
Garbage Time for the Red Sox?
OK, I know the Red Sox are 10 games behind the Yankees in the American League East standings as of this morning, but the clearest sign yet that the 2006 campaign is over for the Carmine Hose came in the top of the 3rd inning of this evening’s contest against the Baltimore Orioles. Announcers Don Orsillo and Jerry Remy spent the majority of the Boston at-bat arguing over the ingredients that go into Brigham’s Reverse the Curse ice cream. Apparently, the action on the field wasn’t compelling enough to warrant any attention. (Come to think of it, the Sox didn’t score, and nothing really exciting did happen). Even so, I don’t think you would have heard that conversation during a mid-September game in 2004.
BTW, in case you were wondering, Brigham’s website reports that “Curse Reversed” ice cream contains “ Brigham’s delicious vanilla ice cream and is loaded with chocolate covered peanuts, chocolate covered caramel cups and swirls of Brigham’s fudge sauce. That actually sounds pretty good…
SL Outage Tomorrow
In the event you haven’t already heard, Linden Labs plans to close the Grid tomorrow from 7am to 12pm SLT (West Coast time), to implement the 1.12.1 upgrade. My hope is that by taking the Grid for 5 hours, that LL is going to try and work through some of the bugs that have made recent upgrades a harbinger of more downtime. It does seem like they’re trying to make things better, but it does seem like things aren’t getting better in terms of the bugs and crashes that everyone is experiencing.
Another interesting announcement from Linden involved the recent removal of the “Friend’s Online” page on the SL website. The reason given is that there has been a ton of traffic to the site, which has caused challenges to Linden in keeping the site up. Apparently, the recent password issues have caused an increase in traffic in general, so Linden is trying to allocate their resources as best they can to keep things up and running. Unfortunately, the continuing problems with the Presence functionality have made the Friend’s Online page a key piece of the SL experience, since it’s been impossible to tell who’s online and who isn’t while in-world using the HUD. Losing the Friend’s Online page is going to make it less “social” for people in-world, until the Presence issue gets resolved.
I can only hope that tomorrow’s upgrade will bring some improvements.
Five Years Later – Missing Things
Exactly one year and a day after my last visit to NYC and Ground Zero, I made another trip to New York City, this time for business. It was strange to realize as my flight approached the city, that another year had passed. It seems like just a few weeks ago that I spent the morning walking around the WTC site, listening to the roll of names being called, seeing the memorials lining the streets.
Our flight came down the Hudson, and as we passed the Tappan Zee bridge, I remembered how we used to drive over the bridge when I was young, on our way to my Aunt’s house in NJ. On a really clear day, you could look down the Hudson, and see the Towers marking the horizon.
As the skyline of the city appeared in the plane window, I looked towards lower Manhattan, as I’ve done so many times. I still almost instinctively look for the Twin Towers at the tip of the island, and it’s a little disorienting to see a rather bland skyline where once a very distinctive one stood.
Once I arrived at the client’s office, on Broad Street, by the waterfront, I took a few moments outside to check my voicemail messages, and realized that I was only a few blocks from Ground Zero. I considered delaying my flight home, to take a walk to the site, and walk around again, but decided against it. I know I’ll visit the site again, probably many times in my life, but not today. Today, I just wanted to try and remember from a distance.
Five Years Later
It seems hard to believe that it’s 5 years later. My daughter, who was 20 months old at the time, just started First Grade last week. Her sister, who wasn’t even born on that horrible day, started her second year of preschool last Friday. We have a photograph, which hung on our refrigerator for a long, long time, of my 20 month-old daughter, in a small blue bathing suit and a wide brimmed straw hat, holding hands with her 21 month old male cousin, running down a sandy Cape Cod beach. We believe the photo was taken on September 10th, a picture of incredible childlike innocence that stands in stark contrast to the horror that was to unfold the next day. My wife had taken my daughter down to the Cape to spend the week with her parents, who were looking for a retirement home. The morning of September 11th, my wife recalled, the still, cloudless morning was shattered by the sounds of fighter jets screaming across the sky leaving Otis Air Force base. My father-in-law immediately thought something was wrong, for the jets never made that kind of noise, or took off and disappeared so quickly. A short time later, the morning news programs began showing the familiar, horrific pictures of the first World Trade Center tower afire.
I was at work, in a meeting, sitting in a conference room overlooking the Neponset River, when someone burst into the room to announce that a plane had hit the World Trade Center. I immediately thought of the story my father told me of a military plane that hit the Empire State Building in the late 40’s. I thought it must have been a tragic accident, although a look outside at the clear cloudless sky did cause me to wonder momentarily how a pilot could strike such a large target on such a beautiful day. A short time later, the meeting was interrupted again, by someone reporting that a second plane had hit the towers. I was openly incredulous – there HAD to have been some mistake. But, of course, there was no mistake, and the meeting adjourned, and people scrambled to find radios and portable tv’s and internet connections to follow the story.
My daughter had no idea of what happened that day. Nor did she understand why, when she and her mother returned home the next day after aborting their vacation, I knelt down to hug her, and burst into tears. A horrific event turned personal, and much worse that night, when my father called to tell me that my cousin had been aboard Flight 11, and had certainly perished.
The following days were a blur, of memorial services, candlelight vigils, tears, non-stop news coverage, and the sound of fighter jets roaring in circles overhead all night. I found myself awakening every morning at 4am for months afterward, feeling that pit of horror and sadness in my stomach.
Five years later…after 2 wars that show no sign of subsiding, countless terror alerts, whispers of future atrocities, bombs on trains in Spain and London, we still push on. There have been good things that have happened; 2 more wonderful children, marriages in the family, shared moments of a family growing up together. And there have been signs of hope, and of despair on the front lines of the war on terror. But rather than wax political, or try to capture some deep philosophical vein, I think I’ll just let the others do the talking…
Renee Blodgett’s down the avenue
