Category Archives: Weblogs

This Will Shock Celeste: Apparently I’m a ‘Doer’

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BlogTypelizer
I heard about this site called Typealizer that gives you a Myers-Brigg type score by analyzing your blog.  So I tested it and apparently I'm a "Doer" or in the Myers-Brigg vernacular I'm an ESTP.  Click on the image to the left to see the results.

While most of the description does seem to accurately depict me, I think that anyone who knows me would disagree with the whole "doer" moniker.  I'm more of a "think about doing" kind of guy, unless of course the doing helps me avoid real work.  I'm great at doing things like avoiding yard work, avoiding chores, avoiding washing the car, etc.  If that's what they mean then they're dead on.

DIY Traffic Alerts via Text Message

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Do you really need someone on TV to tell you about traffic?  Why, no you don’t now that the North Carolina Department of Transportation (NCDOT) has made their traffic alerts available by RSS feed. I’ve just now put myself into direct competition with local traffic reporter Jennie Stencil by adding the Forsyth County traffic alerts to my blog; just look in the right hand column at the bottom and you’ll find it right there.

Of course you can set up your very own traffic alert system so that you don’t have to wait on anyone.  Here’s one way to get traffic alerts sent via text to your phone:

  • Go to the NCDOT’s Traveler Information Management System page(http://apps.dot.state.nc.us/tims/)
  • Select the region or county that you’re interested in getting traffic updates on.
  • Once you’ve gotten to that page go to the bottom and look for the "RSS" button.
  • Click on that and you’ll go to the page that acts as a kind of permanent news ticker for that particular travel area.
  • Highlight the address in your address bar.  An example would be this address for the Piedmont Triad region: http://apps.dot.state.nc.us/TIMS/RSS/IncidentList.aspx?RegionId=2
  • Go to www.web-alerts.com
  • Paste the address you just copied into the field provided and click "Go".
  • Add your phone number in the appropriate field, add keywords (if you want to) in the keyword field and click "Create Alert".
  • When you get the text asking for confirmation just confirm and you’ll have your very own traffic alert system.

One problem that I’ve found with this is that the alert contains a link to a web page, which is okay for me because I have a Blackberry and an unlimited data plan with Verizon.  For someone who is on the road and getting the text via regular phone this is going to be a problem.  Stay tuned because I’m looking for a way to send a straight text alert.

What’s cool is that NCDOT allows you to select traffic alerts by region, county or route so you don’t have to get alerts for Raleigh if you live in Winston-Salem.

What’s in Your PageRank?

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Anyone who’s worked on websites spends at least a little bit of time wondering how they got earned their Google PageRank.  In fact Steve Rubel thinks that PageRank is uber-important:

There are three reasons why Google Page Rank rules.

1) Page Rank is something you earn by producing high quality content that people link to – or what John Bell describes as socially connected

2) It enables you to influence people on the Internet’s biggest
stage – Google – and just as people are searching for the topics you
are knowledgeable about. This means it amplifies your influence because
the press start at search engines when researching stories

3) Finally, Page Rank is channel agnostic and takes the entire
online ecosystem into account. It judges you based on links from all
kinds of sources, not just people who live in the same fish tank. In
other words, it goes beyond people who hang out on Twitter who love
people who Tweet or bloggers who link to other bloggers, etc. It
eschews the echo chamber

PageRank takes time to earn. There are no shortcuts. Google is
democratic and rewards professionals and amateurs equally if they do
their job well. Create high quality content that earns links from other
quality sources and, over time, your Google Page Rank grows as does
your influence and responsibility.

Here’s the thing, though.  I actually have two PageRanks for this blog’s home "page".  You see I host this blog on a service called Typepad and there are two addresses you could type into your browser and reach my blog: http://www.jonlowder.com and http://practicalinc.typepad.com/jon.  If you type in the first version my PageRank shows up as a "2 of 10" but if you type in the second one I’m a "5 of 10."  Exact same content, just different URL.  Essentially when someone types http://www.jonlowder.com they get forwarded to the second address, so really you end up in the same place (I think) but it’s interesting to me that they would have different PageRanks.  If some smart person could explain the difference I’d sure appreciate it.

Why I Haven’t Been Wasting My Time the Last Four Years

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For all my friends (Ted) who think I’ve been wasting my time the last four years writing this blog, I would like you to read the following from non-other than Tom Peters.

"If you’re not blogging, you’re an idiot," management uber-guruTom Peters
told hundreds of attendees at the Inc. 5000 conference yesterday. "No
single thing in the last 15 years has been more important to me
professionally than blogging… It’s changed my thinking, it’s changed
my outlook… it’s the best damn marketing tool and it’s free."

Tom’s blog is featured on his company home page.

Peters’ fellow presenter at the conference was Seth Godin, and he had this to say about blogging:

Fellow panelist Seth Godin
agreed: "What matters is the humility that comes from writing (a blog),
that forces you to describe why you did something. It doesn’t matter if
anyone is reading your blog. You’re doing it for yourself."

So there!

NCAA Clueless

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It seems the NCAA has a policy on journalists blogging from the body’s sanctioned events.  In some instances journalists have been booted from the press box for violating the policy:

This isn’t the first time the NCAA has cracked down on blogging. In
June 2007, Brian Bennett of the Louisville Courier-Journal was thrown
out of the press box for posting live updates on a Louisville-Oklahoma
State baseball game. The NCAA said in a memo to reporters that "no blog
entries are permitted between the first pitch and the final out of each
game." Scott Bearby, an associate general counsel for the NCAA, told the New York Times
that the governing body had a right to protect the contracts it
establishes with television networks and its own Internet providers.

According to the article the policy "allows for only five blog entries per half, one at halftime and two in an overtime period of football and basketball games."  This is incredibly stupid on so many levels, but to start with let’s state the obvious:

  • People are going to live blog an event, whether or not its from the press box.  The NCAA apparently missed the whole "citizen journalism" memo.
  • The way traditional media are bleeding jobs the NCAA should be grateful for any coverage they’re getting.
  • I don’t care how good the blogger is, reading about the action won’t hold a candle to actually watching the game or listening to it on the radio. We don’t watch the games merely to get the scores, we watch to see how the scores come about.
  • How is a blogger interfering with the official "internet providers"?  If a blogger can replicate what an "internet provider" is providing then the NCAA has some seriously crappy contracts.

The NCAA is exhibiting the same kind of behavior I’ve seen with some companies. They have this whole concept of image control and traditional media management that is being completely blown out of the water by the developments of the last 5-10 years.  They don’t seem to realize that in today’s media environment it is impossible to control the message and that rather than trying to micro-manage the messengers they should concentrate on creating an environment that prompts the messengers to speak positively of them in their own way.

To use the NCAA case as an example I’d say they’d be better served if they embraced the bloggers.  Some ideas:

  • Have a box on the official "internet providers" streaming video that shows RSS feeds of all the bloggers covering the event.  So if it’s a football game the viewer could see what the bloggers are writing next to the window that’s showing the streaming video feed (if that’s what it is).  This would allow the fans at home to see what others are saying and compare it to what they’re seeing with their own eyes.
  • Have the producers of the broadcasts monitor the feeds and react to interesting items on the air.  They already do that with emailed questions that the on air analysts answer, so why not use the feeds for on air fodder?  Think about it for a second and you realize that the "official" media would be getting extra content for nothing.  Why would they not want that?
  • Easy objection to the above: What if the bloggers are saying something negative about the commentators or the player?  Well, it’s going to be said/written anyway and you might as well give your official providers a chance to respond in their own defense.  And hey, nothing jacks ratings like a little controversy.

Hat tip to John Robinson for the link to the story.

PaidContent Bought

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Back in
early 2002 I was working for a b-to-b publisher in Washington, DC and
was very tired of the commute in and out of the city.  I decided to go
out on my own as a consultant and my first client was MarketingSherpa, which had been launched by Anne Holland not too long before that.  At the same time PaidContent.org was launched by Rafat Ali and since they were in similar businesses the two companies bumped into each other on occasion.

PaidContent was more of a "newsy" operation while MarketingSherpa
was more of a "how-to" for marketers.  I haven’t talked to Anne in
years, but by outward appearances MarketingSherpa is doing very well
and I think she’s built a sustainable business based on email
newsletters that are free (content is put behind a firewall after a
couple of weeks, so it must be purchased if you want to see it after
that), and then selling premium content like reports and events to the
large base of free subscribers.  From what I can tell PaidContent went
more in the direction of ad sales as a revenue stream, although they
also sell ads and host events, and they too seem to be doing very
well.  So well, in fact, that PaidContent is being purchased by the Guardian Media Group out of the UK.

Nice to see all the hard work has paid off for Ali and his crew, and
I’m also glad to see Anne continuing to do so well.  They also have
shown that there’s more than one way to skin a cat in the online media
world.

Esbee the Muckraker

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I was sitting on the deck reading the morning paper while slurping my cuppajoe when I stumbled upon an article in the Local section titled Salem Promo Attracts Notice with an accompanying picture of Oprah Winfrey in standard graduation ceremony dress.  It sounded hauntingly familiar and I knew why when I read this:

What kind of women go to Salem College?

Let’s hear it from someone who experienced it firsthand …

Oprah Winfrey?

The indomitable talk-show host attended Tennessee State University,
but the above lines from a promotional video for Salem College are
generating a lot of buzz online.

The video aired last fall as part of a showcase of Piedmont colleges done by WFMY-TV.

Lucy Cash recently posted it on her blog, "Life in Forsyth," spurring a wave of reaction.

"Everyone seems to be reading that blog," said Jacqueline McBride, the director of communications at Salem College.

I knew it!  Esbee, aka Lucy Cash, wrote a post about the rather misleading Salem College promotional video featuring Ms. Winfrey.  It’s misleading in the sense that it makes the average person think that Ms. Winfrey has a deeper relationship with Salem College than her appearance as a commencement speaker in 2000.  Esbee really is a muckraker isn’t she?

But let’s take a step back and look at the bigger picture and see the news cycle for this particular story. First there’s the fact that this video was produced by a local television station, WFMY, for a feature on local colleges.  So a local station, with its own news operation, didn’t see anything untoward about the school’s allusions to Winfrey’s ties to the college.  Next, the school so likes the video that they buy it and post it on their website and their own YouTube channel.  So far, so good.  Over six months later Esbee finds the video and posts about it. **Correction received via email from Esbee: "Small correction: Salem didn’t put the video up until last week. It aired six months ago, but i
didn’t see it until they posted it on YouTube." ** Then, almost two weeks after that the Winston-Salem Journal picks up the story and runs with it.

This leads me to ask the same question I’ve been asking for at least two years: why in the world doesn’t someone at the Journal figure out a way to get Esbee under their umbrella?  I suspect they get plenty of story leads from her that she never gets cited on, which I understand is the way the game is played since her blog is a public domain and Journal staffers have as much right to read it as we do, but they don’t get any of her traffic.  Instead they’ve floundered about with their own blog efforts, trying to get their already stretched staff to blog in addition to their reporting, but not realizing that just because you can write a news piece doesn’t mean you can be a good blogger.

Folks like Esbee, entrenched in their community, gifted with a "voice" that attracts local readers like honey to pollen, are gold.  You can’t fake what she does and you can’t snap your fingers and say to your metro reporter, "Hey, I want you to invent something as creative as ‘And I mean exact’."  I’m not even saying they should have tried to hire her.  They could have simply approached her with some sort of offer that would have allowed her to retain her independence and yet benefit them with traffic and ad revenue.

But who knows.  I’m sure there’s some perfectly logical reason, and who’s to say Esbee would have gone for it.  Maybe they did try to woo her, but somehow I doubt it.  This is the same organization that is trying to survive by making the tactical decision to cut head count, which in my humble view is a strategic error that could sink the business.  I’ve written many times that the one advantage that newspapers have always had is their "feet on the street" and depth of coverage of local events.  Sadly, that ’tis no more.

Oh, BTW, Esbee’s next "And I Mean Exact" is being posted at 1 p.m. today.  Be there or be square.

Vacation in Waziristan

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So I came across a post at Ed Cone’s blog that links to an opinion piece in the Carrboro Citizen that references my blog posts about the road blocks I encountered in Alamance County a couple of weeks ago.  Ed also linked to my posts which of course caught my attention (hey, I have an ego too) so when I saw that there were comments on the post I decided to check them out lest someone call me names without me calling him names back.  That’s when I read the following comment spam:

Interview Request

Hello Dear and Respected,
I hope you are fine and carrying on the great work you have been doing
for the Internet surfers. I am Ghazala Khan from The Pakistani
Spectator (TPS), We at TPS throw a candid look on everything happening
in and for Pakistan in the world. We are trying to contribute our
humble share in the webosphere. Our aim is to foster peace, progress
and harmony with passion.

We at TPS are carrying out a new series of interviews with the notable
passionate bloggers, writers, and webmasters. In that regard, we would
like to interview you, if you don’t mind. Please send us your approval
for your interview at my email address "ghazala.khi at gmail.com", so
that I could send you the Interview questions. We would be extremely
grateful.

regards.

Ghazala Khan
The Pakistani Spectator
http://www.pakspectator.com

That was followed by a fantastic follow up from scharrison:

Dear Ghazala,

I’ve been thinking about taking the family on a trip to Waziristan. Can you recommend any good bed & breakfasts?

I love these internet tubes