I was just in Park City with 15 friends from college during the first weekend of the Sundance Film Festival. It was an absolute blast - great to catch up with old friends, the energy in Park City is great, the snow was spectacular and you can get occasional movie star sightings. The downsides, the crowds, realizing you’re getting older and the Patriots loss to the Colts in the AFC title game.
Dave has put together a zip file to simplify upgrading from 2.06 to 2.07. Wish I’d seen this post before I did this. Thanks Dave. Appreciate it. Really.
Andy has a great series of posts on building user generated content sites based on lessons learned from Judy’s Book. Highly recommended
I was walking with Macy to get a coffee this morning when I saw this school bus stuck in a roundabout with the driver on the phone calling his Dad to let him know that he would be on King 5 News. As I was chatting with him, I learned that it’s common for larger city vehicles (garbage trucks, school buses) to drive right over roundabouts. While this was news to me, it makes perfect sense. Unfortunately, the recent weather in Seattle made this speed reduction device particularly effective.
Judy’s Book has put together a Valentine’s Day gift guide which includes information on the price of a dozen long stem roses in over 25 cities across the country. It’s pretty fascinating data - the range of prices is amazing from $39.99 (ProFlowers) to $100.00 (LA Botanicals). I’m not a fan of Valentine’s Day, just another Hallmark creation in my book, but if you’re dating someone you’re probably going to have to participate.
Tips from conversations with florists:
I found the second point fascinating - wait until the first week of Feb. The early bird gets ripped off apparently.
I’m a brand new blogger, so please pardon how pathetic my traffic stats are. Having said that, I found that submitting a site to stumble generates some pretty quick traffic spikes.
The two spikes were on 1/13 & Today and the posts in question were
My traffic hasn’t lasted which suggests that my blog doesn’t line up well with what folks on Stumble are looking for which is heartbreaking (ok maybe I’m exaggerating). Nevertheless, the temporary spike is impressive. Even more impressive is the real-time response. The lag between today’s submission and a traffic response was about 45 minutes.
Greg Sterling has a post on Search Engine Journal about vertical vs. horizontal search that is well worth reading. He makes a great point about the challenges facing vertical search and whether they will really win the consumer adoption battle.
From the post:
“Rather I’m interested in how that richness or improvement is effectively conveyed to consumers. Will people get it and will they change their behavior accordingly — meaning switch to the vertical engine? Or, is everyone doomed to perpetually play the SEM traffic arbitrage and/or SEO game?
People say to me that a better experience will be self-evident and that will motivate the change in usage. I’m not so sure. It’s really an empirical question that has yet to fully play out.”
This is a really important point. Changing consumer behavior is really hard and takes a long time. The key challenge facing vertical search (even after getting the technology/data aggregation correct) is convincing consumers to go somewhere other than Google to search for what they are looking for.
It has worked in certain segments - travel, jobs - but in general, it’s a tough slog. “Build it and they will come” is probably not going to be productive.
This took place in NYC of all places. How unbelievably fucking retarded. In a nation of immigrants (I’m one myself) in New York, the irony is amazing.
“Foreigner fee” added to bill at NYC restaurant
It’s a stereotype that foreign diners in the US are bad tippers. Whether this is true or not varies from restaurant to restaurant, but it isn’t difficult to see why waiters and waitresses might expect people who aren’t used to tipping their servers 15-20% at the end of a meal to simply not do it. If a waiter gets stiffed on the tip, the only real recourse is to curse at bad luck before continuing on to the next table. But the manager of the restaurant Aquagrill in New York decided that something should be done about this perceived issue. He decided to add an automatic 18% gratuity to the bill when the diners were foreign, because ” foreigners don’t tip.”
In this instance, the party that was taxed consisted of four diners who all reside in the US, ordered in English and conversed amongst themselves in French during their meal. Their “foreignness” was apparently identified because they all spoke French, so the tax was applied. Adding a tax to a bill without informing the diners in advance is illegal, at least in New York City, where the Department of Consumer Affairs allows a 15% gratuity to be added to parties of 8 or more, as long as notification is conspicuously printed on the menu. The group confronted the manager and eventually paid the bill, noting that they would not return to the restaurant.
The owner of the restaurant, Jennifer Marshall, has since refunded their bill in full and blamed the poor judgment of the manager for the gaff.
Brad Feld has a post about this article in Wired which led me to read it. It’s a critical account of how Yahoo lost the search advertising war to Google. Highly recommended.
From the article:
The problem, of course, is that better-late-than-never often fails in technology markets that operate as winner-take-all games. Just as Microsoft boxed out other operating systems in the 1980s and office software in the 1990s and eBay has largely outpaced other auction rivals, Google now dominates search-driven advertising.
I was chatting with a friend yesterday and he remarked that Yahoo’s presence on his machine was getting really intrusive. We both agreed that “Yahoo was the new AOL.” Large flashing icons and screens, exhortations to download this and download that, default settings to automatically run everything at startup, encouragement to download the Yahoo branded IE7, etc. From my perspective, that’s not a good sign. Tricking users into using your product more rather than delivering utility which keeps them coming back seems like a dangerous path to go down.
While it may seem like I’m Yahoo-bashing, it had been my primary platform (start page + email) since 1997. Last year, I switched to Google.
