giving

An old colleague of mine used to joke he was one of millions whose job it was to “feed the internet.” This past November, an alumnus of a prestigious writing program in Louisville, Ky. told soon-to-be-alumni his blogging career was short-lived because, like a bad girlfriend, his blog constantly needed him.

Recent by comments by Microsoft executives have led to speculation that Microsoft may abandon the Zune.Microsoft CEO Ballmer declared at CES that consumers increasingly were moving away from one task devices like the Zune towards smart phones while at the same time stating flatly that no Zune phone was in the works.

Question: We were thinking of mirroring our website by giving affiliates subdomains with our content like xyz.oursite.com. Is this a good idea or a duplicate content nightmare?

The Honda S2000’s antenna fits perfectly on my Toyota Matrix, and looks much better than the skinny piece of plastic that came with the car.  So I bought one - an S2000 antenna, not an S2000.  Yet as Google ignores all but one part of Urchin, you have to wonder if it would have bought the whole Honda.

My friends at digital-telepathy passed something along to me for a look and a laugh. Turns out, it’s an interesting illustration of search engine optimization and a web design shooting blanks. The site is optimized but someone forgot to consider how to target it for customers, not just search engines. In addition, the design isn’t responding to one of the most popular reasons someone would go to the site. In the writeup, called Search+ :: It’s All In The Grinds, the story goes that, upon hearing the office call for a Starbucks run, an office employee decided to order something different from Starbucks. He went to search for the Starbucks website to see what he could order differently. He writes,

I had coffee with a potential partner and our conversation ebbed to a discussion about marketing philosophy.  He said something like, "I think companies [like yours] just give away many of their trade secrets on their website.  They provide too much information.  If I wanted to compete with you... all I would need to do is read your website or blog.  The purpose of a website is to solicit interest... you've got to get people to respond... to generate leads." My response...

Do you worry about the danger of giving a 3rd party service control over the most important part of your blogging business - your subscribers?

This analysis was conceived when the coauthors discovered we'd each been independently seriously tempted to buy a Mac Mini, and realized what that temptation implied.