I'm so excited to see 300 in the theaters when it opens that I'm literally vibrating right now.
Don't judge me.
I consider myself a fairly educated guy. I have degrees. I read lots. I go to museums. I understand important issues and can create and articulate opinions on them.
But show me a movie with a sword fight and armies massing to chuck axes at each other, and I immediately turn into a 12 year old.
All preliminary reports of the movie seem to indicate that I'm not going to be disappointed. The two I would point to specifically are this review from Ain't it Cool News, and this interview in Wired with director Zack Snyder, who starts off the conversation by saying:
No one should ever take drugs, ever. I want to go on the record on that. But if someone was to slip you a mickey, I would immediately get into a taxi and go to an Imax screening of 300.
Nice.
I found very interesting the discussion of Snyder's decision to film everything in a studio so he could manipulate the sky, contrast and lighting to reflect the characters' emotional states. He described it as "a big mood ring."
That's one thing I believe is missing from the Web. We've made such great advances in taking advantage of targeting content for visitors based on their geography, the technology they use, the time of day they visit, etc. But in only the rarest of occasions do we ever manipulate content based on the visitors' moods. The only counterexamples I can think of are various blog sites that purport to give the mood of the author. But that doesn't really count, because that's changing the site for the author, not the reader, and the change is usually very minuscule (an icon on livejournal, for example). Another example is any number of Internet music sites that will feed music according to the mood you're in. The best visual of this that I've found to date is at musicovery. I don't think that the algorithm they created picks the most appropriate music to match the mood I select (maybe they need to purchase or get acquired by Pandora for that), but the mood widget is a nice example of what I want.
I'd love for Firefox to have an extension that allows the visitor to set a mood along any of a variety of continuums. I'd take positive (happy) to negative (sad), energetic to tired, and formal to irreverent as my first three. Then I'd want the extension to tag the visitor for that day with a quantifiable emotional state. And I'd want an open API for websites to be able to read those moods and adapt their content using whatever CMS or MVT tools they have. Would a visitor mind if a website knew his or her mood? I don't think so. To a perceptive stranger, one's mood is already publicly accessible. Plus, I think visitors might appreciate content that wasn't all bubbly if they've been having a bear of a day.
Alternatively, I wonder if one could extrapolate a visitor's mood from a playlist and present content based on that. I'd pay for it without blinking (at least for a test). That would be a unique business model for Internet radio players.
And if you could somehow inject the occasional sword fight, I'd be yours forever.
I saw this story about a blogger who is really angry at Lycos for deleting her emails and then treating her like a total jackass. The read is compelling and Lycos comes out looking, to put it mildly, like a group of not very nice people.
Of course, the various outraged commentors worked through the clues in the post and actually end up finding the guy they think wrote the nasty emails on behalf of Lycos to the wronged blogger. There are all sorts of links to his now-slash-dotted personal sites. This guy will forever be tied to one of the worst customer service experiences in recent memory. If customer service is his true calling, and he ever expects to work for a company that knows enough to Google his name, he's screwed and will never be able to go on a power trip like that again. Justice is served.
Now what if everybody's wrong?
There are two possible sources for error here:
If either or both of the above injected some degree of inaccuracy into the situation, then it is conceivable that some guy will be forever tainted by something that didn't happen or wasn't done by him.
I want to be clear here: I have no real, actual information that this thing is a hoax and that some guy is getting dragged through the mud for no good reason. But I have no real, actual information that proves this guy is getting his just desserts either.
It would be so easy to let this sort of thing get out of control.
So WishRadar is up and running now, in case I haven't told you about it in person. It's a free service that lets you track the price and availability of items on your wishlists (CDs, books, DVDs, etc.) in one place. You set your target price and we watch your targets on Amazon and Half.com for the cheapest available purchase. When we see a target at the price you want it, we alert you (via email, RSS and/or SMS). What with all of the "tracking" and "targeting" and "acquiring" we're doing for you, the concept of Radar seemed apt. God, I'm an awesome marketer.
It's fundamentally weird to work for a bigger company during the day and to have a side gig with friends going on for the evenings and weekends. The roles and responsibilities for WishRadar are far more varied and interesting- I do everything from writing copy, to setting up Google Analytics, to yes, even monkeying around with small snippets of code. Contrast that to my day job, where I have a more managerial and strategic focus, I am supported by experts in analytics to do much of the heavy lifting for me, and I would probably be beaten to death with keyboards in the parking lot by a roving band of JAVA developers if I ever tried to change code myself.
I like the mind-shift that the side gig forces me to confront. For one, it forces me to use bits of my brain that might otherwise atrophy. Digging in dirt and details is an important safeguard against locking oneself in an ivory tower, and my utility as an effective manager evaporates when I cease to understand the blood and guts of how things work. Also, I get a fantastic dose of perspective on how generally lost I am without good, smart people around me. I don't want to come off sounding like I can't tie my own shoes (I have my good days), but sometimes recognizing how bad I am at something renews my appreciation for how gifted my colleagues are at it.
So Anyway.
If you haven't checked out the site, please do sign up and give it a whirl. I'd be grateful for your feedback.
So I just got back from the eMetrics conference in Washington DC, and I give it a B-.
I should qualify at the beginning of the post (before the entire Web Analytics community proclaims a fatwa against me) that I loathe conferences. With few exceptions, the conferences I have attended have keynotes that are over-broad to the point of being useless, the networking makes me feel like a miserable social failure, and the selling is hard, constant, and from vendors who are totally irrelevant to my needs. The average grade for a conference has historically been a D.
eMetrics rose modestly above its peers in part because it is so specialized and, for better or for worse, is such a close knit and woefully small community of hyper-knowledgeable people. Inevitably, things will be relevant to you here, regardless of where you land in the web analytics continuum of experience.
Because I have no imagination whatsoever, I will split my comments into the well worn buckets of "good" and "bad".
Good
Bad
Bonus Category - Suggestions
Aside from doing more of the "good" stuff and less of the "bad" stuff, I have compiled a list of some suggestions for upcoming eMetrics conferences. I feel compelled to do this, since I lost my feedback forms.
A B- from me is not a bad thing, but at $2000+ per ticket (not including travel), there can be no room for grade inflation. I congratulate Jim on a fine event and look forward to upcoming conferences.
I played around with ajaxwrite this morning. It's the new whiz-bangy web-hosted word processor, that's getting all the blog press. I really don't need a new word processor. I already have one that works which was installed on my computer before it was handed to me at work. But philosophically, I love the fact that this is doing the exact same thing huge providers do, but for free. The commoditization of software will mean the end to Microsoft as we know it (sorry, I know it's cliche to pick on our friends in Redmond, but everyone knows that when the revolution comes, MSFT will be first against the wall).
That being said, I would like to post an...
Open Letter to the Guys who Made Ajaxwrite
Hi Guys,
Nice job. Keep it up.
I will never, ever, ever be able to use ajaxwrite in real life without a spell-check native to the program. If that's not in version 1.01, it should be.
That is all.
Best,
-Jason