Here are the some of the blogs I've read this week and thought were worth sharing:
www.drawncloser.com - My new favorite comic strip, drawn by my friend Jimmy Steen. You can also follow him on Twitter at @steenfamily.
http://www.chrisbrogan.com/23-essential-elements-of-sharable-blog-posts/ - Chris has some good tips for making people want to share your blog posts. I'm probably not following any of them right now, but for those of you trying to get started with a blog, some good advice. Do as I say, not as I do, my Dad used to say...
I read quite a number of blogs ever week, but I spend very little time "surfing the Web." Instead, I subscribe to blogs using RSS, or Real Simple Syndication. My RSS Reader is Google Reader. When I find a new blog that I like, I subscribe to it by looking for the following image and clicking on it.
If you want to understand RSS better, you should take a look at this video from CommonCraft:
I had the pleasure of listening to theDuct Tape Marketing Podcast recently, the March 23 episode featureing David Meerman Scott, who recently wrote the book called World Wide Rave. David makes some really interesting points about how trends get started on the Internet. He provides numerous case studies on viral videos and blog posts, and how people have used these to build their businesses.
Examples included Blendtec, a maker of heavy-duty blenders who increased sales tenfold after creating some wacky videos and the site Will it Blend?, showing their blenders chop non-food items. He also talks about Helaine Smith, DMD, a Boston Dentist who quintupled her business after publishing a free e-book called "Healthy Mouth, Healthy Sex."
Seth Godin had a great post recently -- a video showing a guy dancing, then two guys dancing, then... well, watch for yourself.
Seth's point is the first guy is very important, and the 3rd guy is very important, but Guy #49 is pretty much a dime a dozen. I'd like to put in a word for Guy #2 who took a real risk by joining Guy #1. He could have been rejected, but he joined in and believed in the movement. Guy #3 gets credit for the big wave but maybe there would not be a Guy #3 if not for Guy #2? Read Seth's comments at http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2009/06/guy-3.html
My daughter Patti is in London, England for three weeks as part of the USC Law program, and we are keeping her daugther Eva. We have been having nightly Skype sessions where she tells us about her day and she is even able to read bedtime stories to Eva. It is amazing and it is free.
Downloading and installing Skype is easy. Patti has a headset that cost around $20, and at both ends we have a Microsoft Lifecam VX-3000 camera which is excellent and easy to use. The Lifecam has a camera and built-in microphone. Patti can use Skype-out features to call any phone for $.02 per minute. Typicall she calls us at home to setup the call and follows up with a video call a few minutes later.
Skype is a must-have for anyone traveling overseas.
Some of you are aware that my partners and I are trying to bring back the Mongo Bat. We are getting closer to actually begin manufacturing the bats and trying to figure out how to sell them. Mattel managed to sell 500,000 of the bats in the early 1990's, and we would like to do something similar, but without the cost of T.V. commercials and Saturday morning advertisements.
I think it's fair to say our marketing strategy is not totally worked out-- we have some ideas, but none of them are complete at the moment.
So with this in mind I read the story of Chris Hedgecock, who started an eBay Affiliate site called CarsForAGrand.com, focusing on inexpensive cars being sold on eBay. Chris decided to promote his site by buying a sub-$1000 car from his site, then driving cross-country, stopping at small cities along the way and visiting with local morning news shows. The story was eventually picked up nationally and brought him over 110,000 unique visitors in one day.
I fell in love with a new Drupal module tonight. I am working on rebuilding the New York Pizza Finder site (www.newyorkpizzafinder.com). This site is a database of New York Style pizza places around the country. It started with my New York Pizza Blog, located at pizza.wordpress.com. Then it transformed to an Access database and a number of ASP pages and Google Maps integration.
Then for some insane reason I decided to make it a wiki, so I installed MediaWiki. This was a terrible idea-- I ended up with a very unstructured database and a site that attracted a bunch of spammers. The battle with spam was manageable for the better part of the year, but then the spammers started getting smarter and doing multiple updates in rapid succession which made backing out their changes quite laborious, and I finally just shut down the site.
I am now rebuilding it with Drupal, which I believe will be a smart long-term solution for the site. Today I found a new module called Node Import. According to the module's Project Page, the module is not quite complete, but I gave it a go anyway. The function of the module is to allow me to import a CSV file from my desktop directly into a specific Content Type within Drupal, including content types created with the Drupal Content Creation Kit (CCK).
This module worked like a charm. It has a wizard that walks you through mapping each field in the CSV file to specific fields in the Content Type.
I'm a new big fan of the Node Import Module. Thanks to those who put the time into developing it.
