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research – jstrauss

Delicious Bookmarks for September 24th through March 8th

These are my Delicious links for September 24th through March 8th:

Delicious Bookmarks for July 21st through August 31st

These are my Delicious links for July 21st through August 31st:

Delicious Bookmarks for April 17th through April 21st

These are my Delicious links for April 17th through April 21st:

Delicious Bookmarks for March 31st through April 2nd

These are my Delicious links for March 31st through April 2nd:

  • Social Media ROI – Solid presentation on how to approach social media marketing from a quantitative perspective. Most interesting are the examples of different types of social media campaigns to drive different business goals. There is no one-size-fits all social media marketing campaign.
  • The Lab – A web-based Sass -> CSS compiler. Sass is basically a shorthand way to write stylesheets for your website. It allows for nesting with two spaces. Also, it can do some basic math with constants. No more going around your CSS files updating the size or color of something.
  • Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable « Clay Shirky – "When reality is labeled unthinkable, it creates a kind of sickness in an industry. Leadership becomes faith-based, while employees who have the temerity to suggest that what seems to be happening is in fact happening are herded into Innovation Departments, where they can be ignored en masse…With the old economics destroyed, organizational forms perfected for industrial production have to be replaced with structures optimized for digital data. It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem."
  • Changing Nature of Virality: Facebook and Twitter – A consolidation of interesting stats from Hitwise on percentages of traffic to entertainment sites driven by Twitter and Facebook. For example, perezhilton.com's biggest week ever was driven primarily by traffic from Facebook (8.70%) over Google (7.62%). It is clear that for certain types of sites, particularly entertainment-oriented, 'viral' discovery is an increasingly important discovery mechanism being fueled by the growth of social media sites like Facebook and Twitter.
  • The Rising Power Of Social Media As A Traffic Driver – Fred Wilson on the impact he's seeing to traffic on his own blog from Twitter and Facebook: "Links are the currency of the web and traffic is money so these are important trends for our portfolio companies and for everyone who does business on the web."
  • Tony Hsieh: Zappos In The Business of Selling “Happiness” – This was a really great presentation that i was lucky enough to attend in person. Some of my favorite quotes were "Hire slowly, fire quicky", "When all your employees live the brand, you don't need to rely on marketing and PR to handle all your communications", and "We decided to take all the money we would have put into marketing and put it into making the customer experience better." While I do feel that Zappos sounds more like a management/corporate culture experiment than a business, I still think there are a ton of great lessons that less altruistic businesses can apply. My primary takeaway was probably on Slide 17 of the presentation, the idea of "Committable Core Values": having a company mission that is actionable for every employee.
  • Economy Tech trends in 2009 by Mary Meeker (Morgan Stanley) – An omnibus presentation on the current economic climate and the high-level trends that will drive the technology industry in the near future. The first ~40 slides contain some really interesting data and charts on the larger macroeconomic situation and are worth looking at even for people not interested in the technology industry.
  • The Memefication of Your Band – A more pragmatic take on the entertainment-as-a-service concept focused on how musical artists can more effectively promote themselves. "Your band must invade the Perception Economy. Your Band must no longer be a band. Your band must be a meme. A Meme Which Generates subMemes. These memes must be compelling, intriguing, and interesting enough for people to ‘follow’ or at least think that you are ‘worth following.’"
  • High-tech Market Research and Consulting – Quantitative application of the Lanchester model, a WWII military strategy framework, to business in which market share is the proxy for number of troops. Interesting theoretical construct for understanding how players with differing market share should seek to compete in order to maximize their competitive advantage — i.e. smaller players should seek to segment a larger market into smaller pieces in which they can compete closer to market share parity while larger players should seek to compete in the broadest market possible to maximize the value of their dominance.
  • WordPress › WP Greet Box « WordPress Plugins – A very useful WordPress plugin that shows visitors to your blog a unique greeting message depending on the page they are visiting from. E.g. Ask users coming from Digg.com to Digg your post, etc.
  • Chat Catcher – An interesting service to help you track mentions of your blog posts across Twitter, FriendFeed and identi.ca and aggregate them back to your blog. The coolest thing is probably the 'Scriptless' version which can run on WordPress.com and other hosted blogs.
  • Viral Arts: Making you money… Virally – A potentially interesting service that matches YouTube video producers with brands willing to pay them for product placement.
  • The changing face of usability testing: Optimal Workshop releases free service called Treejack » VentureBeat – Basic DIY usability testing tools that allow you to test designs in the form of online surveys. Simple, elegant, and IMHO 80/20 effective (vs full-service usability testing software).
  • Why Bit.ly Will Upstage Digg – Definitely what I would be working on if I was in charge of bit.ly. While analytics were the initial draw for sharers to use bit.ly, recognition as an influencer could be a differentiator now that others like cli.gs and tr.im are commoditizing analytics for shortened URLs. I totally agree with Om that a bit.ly powered Digg (Bigg?) would produce much more interesting and representative results than Digg, which has come to be dominated by an idiosyncratic user community. Also, I think it would be foolish of Bigg to be reserved to bit.ly URLs. Why wouldn't they want share/click data from all the shortened URLs they can get it for?
  • Topspin » “Josh Freese. What are you doin’? This summer.” – Brilliant (and hilarious) showcase of how the internet can make even the way you sell your art part of the experience. Definitely worth the read! My favorite is the $10k package, which includes: "Josh takes you and a guest to Club 33 (the super-duper exclusive and private restaurant at Disneyland located above Pirates of the Caribbean) and then hit a couple rides afterward (preferably the Tiki Room, the Haunted Mansion and Tower of Terror) / At the end of the day at Disneyland, drive away in Josh’s Volvo station wagon. It’s all yours … take it. Just drop him off on your way home, though, please."
  • Relationship Symmetry in Social Networks: Why Facebook will go Fully Asymmetric – Bokardo – A very interesting analysis of the difference between the asymmetric relationship model of Twitter (arguably pioneered by Flickr) and the mostly symmetric relationship model of Facebook today and why the reality of attention inequality is a barrier to Facebook's growth as long as they stick to symmetric relationships.

Delicious Bookmarks for February 19th through February 25th

These are my Delicious links for February 19th through February 25th:

  • HTML URL Encoding Reference – Handy table of the URL encoded values for ASCII characters.
  • A foot and a half: Finally, A Use for Twitter – Greatest Twitter story evar! I actually saw these tweets from @the_real_shaq while this was happening, now we get the backstory from the guys for whom they were intended. I <3 Shaq!
  • The Crisis of Credit Visualized – Astute, approachable, and just plain pretty animated explanation of our current economic situation. Oh, and did I mention INCREDIBLY FRIGHTENING!? Once you realize how simple, and thus fundamental, the underlying problems are, it becomes very difficult to believe in a quick or easy fix. Now, back to stuffing my remaining cash into my mattress…
  • How Freshbooks Built an Army of Passionate Evangelists on Twitter. How are YOU doing so? | Blog of Mr. Tweet – A great story from a company passionate about serving customers and building relationships with them (CRB = customer relationship building) and how they extended the reach of that passion through Twitter. Worth the read.
  • The Missing Google Analytics Manual | FutureNow’s GrokDotCom / Marketing Optimization Blog – A comprehensive collection of the most helpful links and videos to teach you how to get the most out of Google Analytics.
  • Coding Horror: Commandos, Infantry, and Police – Quotation of a legendary analogy from Robert X. Cringely’s “Accidental Empires” published in 1993. Cringely characterizes the successive waves of employees who staff a company through its lifecycle from startup to industry leader to incumbent as commandos, infrantry, and military police, respectively.”The [commandos’] job is to do lots of damage with surprise and teamwork, establishing a beachhead before the enemy is even aware that they exist. Ideally, they do this by building the prototype of a product that is so creative, so exactly correct for its purpose that by its very existence it leads to the destruction of other products. They make creativity a destructive act.”
  • Add Community to your Site with Triggit! – An interesting idea of using Twitter as a platform to create user communities for your site (a la MyBlogLog). The differentiator is supposed to be that the community discussions happen publicly on Twitter, thus driving more traffic to your site.
  • GroupTweet – Cool simple tool to create what are essentially Twitter group mailing lists. You set up a Twitter account for your group, register it with GroupTweet, and then it’s just a bot that RTs any DMs sent to the group account. In order for a group member to be able to post to the whole group, they need to be followed by the group account. And you can control who reads the group messages by protecting the group account’s updates. Simple, elegant, effective.
  • Analytics Talk ยป Blog Archive ยป Tracking Sub Domains with Google Analytics – Best article I could find on how to track subdomains properly in Google Analytics. Surprised they don’t do it right out of the box. But, these easy to follow instructions and screenshots will get you sorted quickly.

Delicious Bookmarks for January 27th through February 1st

These are my links for January 27th through February 1st:

  • Bookmarklet Builder – Handy tool for building bookmarklets, can convert back and forth from normal Javascript to bookmarklet form.
  • TwitterFriends – Your relevant network on Twitter – The most comprehensive (and interesting) Twitter stats application I've found to date. Instead of gimmickry about how you rank against other Twitter users in meaninglessly vague and opaque terms like "authority," this exposes the hard data about yours and your network's behavior compared to average, and gives you some pretty cool visualizations. If I understood statistics and such better, I think this is the kinda tool I could totally geek out on.
  • Which HD video Web service is the best? | Webware – CNET – In depth side-by-side comparison of online video hosting services.
    "- The victor: YouTube
    This time around, we feel really comfortable giving YouTube the quality crown. Its HD encoding is really nice, and you can't beat the price (free). One thing that really separates it from the others is that you can do so many things with your clip once it's up there. You can replace the music, as well as add subtitles and annotations. Community members can also respond to it, adding in-line video replies."
  • The Bacon Explosion – Take Bacon. Add Sausage. Blog. – NYTimes.com – A (very tasty) example of the power of social media to spread content virally. According to the article, the blog post about this recipe garnered 27,000 views 2 days after being posted thanks mostly to Twitter, Digg, and StumbleUpon. In the month since being posted, it has been viewed 390,000 times and linked to from 16,000 sites. Not bad for some bacon.
  • Secrets of my success: Netflix CEO Reed Hastings – Jan. 28, 2009 – A brief profile on Reed Hastings w/ business tips:
    – Target a specific niche: When there's an ache, you want to be like aspirin, not vitamins. Aspirin solves a very particular problem someone has, whereas vitamins are a general "nice to have" market.
    – Stay flexible: We named the company Netflix (NFLX), not DVDs by Mail because we knew that eventually we would deliver movies directly over the Internet.
    – Never underestimate the competition: We erroneously concluded that Blockbuster (BBI, Fortune 500) probably wasn't going to launch a competitive effort when they hadn't by 2003.
    – There are no shortcuts: Occasionally great wealth is created in a short amount of time, but it's through a lot of luck in those situations. You just have to think of building an organization as a lot of work. It may or may not turn into great wealth.
  • Streaming video cannibalizing DVD rentals, says Netflix – Ars Technica – Netflix results show that streaming video views are taking away from DVD-by-mail volume. Given that there is no price difference (both streaming and DVD-by-mail cost the same per month), the streaming bitrate is at DVD quality or less, and the selection of films available for streaming is worse than that of DVD-by-mail, this is further proof that *convenience* (the only real advantage of streaming vs. DVD-by-mail) is a very powerful motivator for media consumers.
  • Facebook Pages Leaderboard – A neat tool for tracking the popularity of Facebook Pages by number of fans over time. However, the data doesn't appear to be totally reliable. So, be sure to check the current stats on Facebook before hanging your hat on any of these numbers.
  • Announcing the AllFacebook Pages Tracker – Interesting facts about Facebook Page fan stats (as of January 27, 2009)
    – Barack Obama is #1 w/ 4.7M fans, Homer Simpson is #2 w/ 2.6M, and Coca-Cola is #3 w/ 2.3M (I pulled the stats for these from Facebook directly)
    – All Facebook is tracking 620,000 Pages
    – Only 50,000 Pages (~8%) have > 1,000 fans
    – Only 276 Pages (~0.04%) have > 500,000 fans
  • Deborah Schultz: Life isn’t binary, neither is the Social Web – "The social web is my web – it's PERSONAL to me. I am not creating media when I am online so much as I am connecting with people using media as my medium…The social web can actually provide much deeper and more interesting connections for customers and companies than simply being a marketing channel – it ties into the entire product lifecycle. And that is where stuff gets really interesting…and much more complex. This is where relevance and context and trust and intention all come into play."

These are my Delicious links for January 27th through February 1st:

  • Bookmarklet Builder – Handy tool for building bookmarklets, can convert back and forth from normal Javascript to bookmarklet form.
  • TwitterFriends – Your relevant network on Twitter – The most comprehensive (and interesting) Twitter stats application I've found to date. Instead of gimmickry about how you rank against other Twitter users in meaninglessly vague and opaque terms like "authority," this exposes the hard data about yours and your network's behavior compared to average, and gives you some pretty cool visualizations. If I understood statistics and such better, I think this is the kinda tool I could totally geek out on.
  • Which HD video Web service is the best? | Webware – CNET – In depth side-by-side comparison of online video hosting services.
    "- The victor: YouTube
    This time around, we feel really comfortable giving YouTube the quality crown. Its HD encoding is really nice, and you can't beat the price (free). One thing that really separates it from the others is that you can do so many things with your clip once it's up there. You can replace the music, as well as add subtitles and annotations. Community members can also respond to it, adding in-line video replies."
  • The Bacon Explosion – Take Bacon. Add Sausage. Blog. – NYTimes.com – A (very tasty) example of the power of social media to spread content virally. According to the article, the blog post about this recipe garnered 27,000 views 2 days after being posted thanks mostly to Twitter, Digg, and StumbleUpon. In the month since being posted, it has been viewed 390,000 times and linked to from 16,000 sites. Not bad for some bacon.
  • Secrets of my success: Netflix CEO Reed Hastings – Jan. 28, 2009 – A brief profile on Reed Hastings w/ business tips:
    – Target a specific niche: When there's an ache, you want to be like aspirin, not vitamins. Aspirin solves a very particular problem someone has, whereas vitamins are a general "nice to have" market.
    – Stay flexible: We named the company Netflix (NFLX), not DVDs by Mail because we knew that eventually we would deliver movies directly over the Internet.
    – Never underestimate the competition: We erroneously concluded that Blockbuster (BBI, Fortune 500) probably wasn't going to launch a competitive effort when they hadn't by 2003.
    – There are no shortcuts: Occasionally great wealth is created in a short amount of time, but it's through a lot of luck in those situations. You just have to think of building an organization as a lot of work. It may or may not turn into great wealth.
  • Streaming video cannibalizing DVD rentals, says Netflix – Ars Technica – Netflix results show that streaming video views are taking away from DVD-by-mail volume. Given that there is no price difference (both streaming and DVD-by-mail cost the same per month), the streaming bitrate is at DVD quality or less, and the selection of films available for streaming is worse than that of DVD-by-mail, this is further proof that *convenience* (the only real advantage of streaming vs. DVD-by-mail) is a very powerful motivator for media consumers.
  • Facebook Pages Leaderboard – A neat tool for tracking the popularity of Facebook Pages by number of fans over time. However, the data doesn't appear to be totally reliable. So, be sure to check the current stats on Facebook before hanging your hat on any of these numbers.
  • Announcing the AllFacebook Pages Tracker – Interesting facts about Facebook Page fan stats (as of January 27, 2009)
    – Barack Obama is #1 w/ 4.7M fans, Homer Simpson is #2 w/ 2.6M, and Coca-Cola is #3 w/ 2.3M (I pulled the stats for these from Facebook directly)
    – All Facebook is tracking 620,000 Pages
    – Only 50,000 Pages (~8%) have > 1,000 fans
    – Only 276 Pages (~0.04%) have > 500,000 fans
  • Deborah Schultz: Life isn’t binary, neither is the Social Web – "The social web is my web – it's PERSONAL to me. I am not creating media when I am online so much as I am connecting with people using media as my medium…The social web can actually provide much deeper and more interesting connections for customers and companies than simply being a marketing channel – it ties into the entire product lifecycle. And that is where stuff gets really interesting…and much more complex. This is where relevance and context and trust and intention all come into play."