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Leo Laporte has an interesting article about how nobody (including himself) noticed when his posts stopped appearing on Google Buzz and Twitter. "It makes me feel like everything I’ve posted over the past four years on Twitter, Jaiku, Friendfeed, Plurk, Pownce, and, yes, Google Buzz, has been an immense waste of time," he writes. "I was shouting into a vast echo chamber where no one could hear me because they were too busy shouting themselves. All this time I’ve been pumping content into the void like some chatterbox Onan. How humiliating. How demoralizing."

Considering the man has over 222,000 followers on Twitter, it’s pretty interesting.

Seth Godin announced that his next book Linchpin will be the last book he publishes the traditional way.

According to the New York Times, the Dish Network will begin offering a video portal called DishOnline.com this week, making it the latest distributor to provide online benefits to paying subscribers.

TechFlash reports that Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has sold a million Amazon shares for about $138 million. This comes after other Amazon stock sales earlier this year. These sales now reportedly total about $640 million.

Microsoft posted a developer roadmap to the Windows Phone 7 Launch timing today.

Danny Sullivan

Earlier this week, big media (New York Times, Disney, BusinessWeek, Hearst) lodged a bit of a tantrum because they felt Google wasn’t treating them special enough and was giving too much credit to scrapers and aggregators. Sullivan strides to the other, more populist side, saying Google seems to dote on Web-celebs like Guy Kawasaki, Seth Godin, and Jason Calacanis.

Sullivan’s main target was Kawasaki’s new Alltop venture, which is essentially a categorized news aggregator. (Kawasaki calls it an “online magazine rack.”) Users can select categories of interest that lead to lists of subdomains where articles on those topics are brought together. It’s not exactly a new idea, but it does have Kawasaki’s former Apple evangelist weight behind it.

We were unable to duplicate what Sullivan was seeing in his Google search results for keywords like “economic news,” “food news,” etc., but Sullivan’s good reputation precedes him, and we have no reason to doubt what he saw. Google may have corrected, or it could be a regional result variance—from here, older Topix.com, with subfolders instead of subdomains, appears high up the list. (Subfolders, unless I’m mistaken, have been traditionally more SEO friendly.)

We know that in its effort to produce fresher results, a slight tweak to the algorithm was allowing cybercrooks to follow Google Trends, parasite host on trusted sites, and gain high rankings redirecting to scareware (bogus alerts warning a user’s computer is infected to scare them into buying fake anti-virus phishing programs). That glitch appears to have been addressed, and it may have affected Alltop. 

But it still leaves the question about whether in Google’s pursuit of fast, relevant, recent, and trustworthy search results they company has unduly weighted new ventures of star players. Sullivan presents the classic class struggle flipside:

“If Joe Schmoe SEO dude came along and rolled out hundreds of domains like this, worked it on Twitter, who wants to say Google wouldn’t be down on them like a ton of bricks?”

Chris Pirillo

He then brings up Chris Pirillo’s ill-fated Gada.be, whose subdomains got the site banned in Google. The site was eventually unbanned. Meanwhile, Sullivan suggests Godin’s Squidoo received a spam-pass from Google until Calacanis torpedoed it. To top it off, Calacanis’ Mahalo, despite Google’s decree it would drop search engine results from other search engines in its index, still gets quite a bit of Google love.

“You kind of feel sorry for Joe Schmoe,” writes Sullivan. “Build a name by once having worked for Apple or by having written a few marketing books, and you seem to get much better treatment than Joe would get if he pulled the same SEO play stunts.

”Alltop, Mahalo, Squidoo — none of them dominate Google. But seriously, Squidoo has a PR8 home page? Alltop has a PR7? Search Engine Land, which actually produces original content, sits with a PR6 — but these guys that simply compile content from others get a big fat PR kiss on the lips?”

It seems likely those who’ve been used as examples already know the online marketing game very well and also carry with them loyal armies willing to link to any new venture they launch, which gives them an automatic advantage over Joe Schmoe. But it could also be that Google’s constant struggle to balance trust and relevance could also be a player.

Of course, search takes center stage in that struggle, but more recently social media sites like Digg.com and BoingBoing have captured the imaginations of traffic-obsessed marketers. Here’s what many of them discover, though: traffic bursts from those sites do little for sales.

That’s because most that show up at your website’s door aren’t looking for your site, product, or service specifically; they’re looking to graze and move on. Seth Godin reports that 75% of "unfocused visitors" bounce within three seconds, leaving the webmaster with more server issues than increased sales. He calls this "silly traffic."

That’s not to say there’s no benefit in traffic bursts. If you run a content site, i.e., content is the product, then boosts to your traffic numbers and pageviews only help the business. Cracked.com, for example, seems to have really mastered the Diggbait game with list articles and titles like "The 11 Most Unintentionally Gay Rap Lyrics Ever." If Cracked sold merchandise (and they might, I didn’t check), the Digg Effect can only help that side of the business, too.

What Cracked has done right here, echoing Godin’s advice for focusing on and engaging existing visitors, is provide an interactive experience for readers. But also, from a branding perspective, whatever the rate of bouncing visitors, those bursts aren’t for naught. If you’re able to generate bursts consistently, you build familiarity and reach, which in theory generate more sales.

Still, many aren’t interested in the macro-elements associated with branding. They’d rather focus on the nitty-gritty, the proven sales boosters, the more directly measurable strategies. My friend, Shaun, for example, whose specialty is wedding photography in Lexington, Ky., isn’t as interested in building global traffic to his website and increasing pageviews as he is about generating local business. (A little out-of-area exposure helps, though, as he’s on his way to Los Angeles next month to work with the best.)

His main site, since it focuses on photography, is Flash-based. Because he knows search engines don’t dig on Flash, Shaun created a blog the search crawlers can read. This is a place for him to sell himself as well as his services, and to talk about the business in general. As you might imagine, unless he becomes a national brand one day, he has little use for bursts of traffic from Digg.com, even if it couldn’t hurt.

Instead, he’s made use of a Facebook profile (pretty appropriate given the yearbook-ish concept), of photography forums, and of local search keywords and maps*. By doing this, he has not only created a brand for himself (which is immensely important), but has also found a way to drive targeted, purposeful traffic from those actually interested in his services, or, as described earlier, the right traffic.

 
^{_{*He probably should look into Twitter, too, especially since Twitter ranks so well on Google, but also because he can build a nice local following that way.}} 
 
 

Seth Godin is starting to call this "layering" and it’s at the heart of my book, Do It Wrong Quickly. But no good name has emerged. I was contacted recently by Ronny Kohavi, Microsoft’s General Manager of Experimentation Platform, who uses the market research term "controlled experiments" for what they do. Ronny came to Microsoft from Amazon, where he served as Director of Data Mining and Personalization, and he’s written four of the top papers on machine learning according to CiteSeer. He was gracious enough to answer several questions for you to explain how experimental marketing works in real life.

Comments

If you’re a startup founder about to hire an executive (particularly if you’re using an executive recruiter), you should really take 15 minutes out of your busy day and read Zoli’s article. You’ll thank me (though you should thank him).

I’m going to lead with a comment I put on Zoli’s blog:

A startup should not hire Seth Godin for its VP of Marketing. It should hire the next Seth Godin.

Before I go on, if you don’t know who Seth Godin is, feel free to replace with someone else you know who is really successful.

Here’s why you shouldn’t hire Seth:

1. Though past success is often a predictor of future success, it assumes similar circumstances. If you’re hiring some hot-shot executive from Oracel to be your VP of Sales and that executive sold $300MM (or managed people that did), that does not mean they’re going to be able to make a single sale for your startup. Or even find people that are going to sell for you. They may just not have it in them.

2. Even if they would be successful at a startup (because their prior success was a startup too), if they’ve been that successful, they’re not going to be particularly hungry and aggressive. Yes, there’s a certain floor of passion that some successful people are going to have (they’re constitutionally incapable of working 40 hour weeks), but the fire is not going to be the same. They don’t have a point to prove. They’ve already proven it. This is somewhat paradoxical. If they’re really as successful and good as they look on paper, they’re probably not going to be hungry.

3. Startups are an arbitrage game on many levels — particularly recruiting. Any chump can pay $250,000 a year plus options and go hire a VP of Marketing with a pedigree. Show me a startup that can recruit world-class people at below fair market value (at least temporarily) and I’ll show you a startup that has their head on straight. In the world of startup recruiting, you’re playing a passion arbitrage game.

4. Beware the resource needs of executives from big firms. Though they may be great at turning a $20MM marketing budget into $2 billion, it doen’t matter much if you don’t have $20MM. They be a world-class player, but you may not have what they need to succeed.

Summary: Use your passion and instincts to help find the next Seth Godin, and then help them kick-butt.C

Comments

Now Godin takes on pricing of new digital film rentals and the lessons apply to the music industry as well.

"…In the case of online rentals, all of these intermediate costs immediately disappear. Gone. So, why try to mimic the current model when it comes to pricing if the costs are mostly gone?

…I don’t think Free is always the answer, but I do think the studios are about to make a mistake of RIAA proportions. I’d charge fifty cents for an online rental. It would immediately hammer the rental stores…but would instantly teach people a new habit...

Comments

It makes a lot of sense if you think about it. Less people will complete a doctorate as will complete a four year undergraduate degree. Less people will compete a four year degree as will graduate high school. Less education usually means less reading and less reading leads to a lower level of reading comprehension. If the words and sentences you use are too complex a number of people who might otherwise appreciate what you have to say may have trouble following how you’re saying it.

Blogging is a conversation and in order to have a meaningful conversation both sides need to have the ability to understand each other. You could be turning away readers by making it too difficult for them to read and follow what you have to say.

How do you know what level of education is likely needed to understand your writing? Enter the Gunning fog index.

What is the Gunning Fog Index?

The Gunning fog index is a simple test developed by Robert Gunning in the 1950s. The Wikipedia page on the other side of the previous link, lists the algorithm for calculating the index as:

1. Take a full passage that is around 100 words (do not omit any sentences).
2. Find the average sentence length (divide the number of words by the number of sentences).
3. Count words with three or more syllables (complex words), not including proper nouns (for example, Djibouti), compound words, or common suffixes such as -es, -ed, or -ing as a syllable, or familiar jargon.
4. Add the average sentence length and the percentage of complex words (ex., +13.37%, not simply + 0.1337)
5. Multiply the result by 0.4

which leads to the following formula:

The number you get at the end should be the average level of education a person needs to understand the passage in question. A Gunning fog index of 12 correlates to a high school senior.

The formula isn’t perfect. Words like “everyone,” “popular,” and “average” are considered complex words, because each has three syllables. I doubt many would stumble over those words or require having a high level of education to comprehend them. Still if you use them your Gunning fog index goes up. Some passages with a high index are rather easy to read and you can write a passage with a low index that is much more complex than the index would say it should be.

Overall the Gunning fog index does seem like a reasonable indication of how difficult a passage is to comprehend.

The Gunning Fog Index for the Technorati Top 20

I thought it would be interesting to calculate the Gunning fog index for some of the most widely read blogs and see how much schooling we need to understand them. I grabbed the list of popular blogs from Technorati, found three paragraphs from recent blog posts that were about 100 words each (75-125 words), and manually counted words, sentences, and complex words. Then I ran the calculation and took the average of the three paragraphs and called it the Gunning fog index for each blog.

I’d hardly call what I did scientific. Three recent paragraphs is not enough to characterize the writing of an entire blog and I have to admit counting complex words isn’t as easy as you’d think. There’s a little bit of play in some words that use the suffixes mentioned in the list above. A couple of words here or there does affect the calculation, though probably not too significantly. Were I test the same passages again in a few months the numbers below could easily differ somewhat. However, I don’t think the index in generally is meant to be highly scientific. It comes across more as a reasonable approximation of how difficult a piece of writing is to comprehend.

If you count the number of blogs below you’ll notice there aren’t 20. A few of the top blogs didn’t have passages of text long enough to test as they mostly relied on images for their posts. If anything that only adds to the argument that to be read more you need to stay away from complex writing.

I could have continued with blogs further down the popular list, but the manual calculations got tiring and I wasn’t bright enough to search for an online calculator like the ones below.

http://simbon.madpage.com/Fog/
http://www.online-utility.org/english/readability_test_and_improve.jsp
http://www.editcentral.com/gwt/com.editcentral.EC/EC.html

If anything the indexes I calculated will be a little bit high. Whenever I wasn’t sure if a word was considered complex I generally counted it. I also compared a few of my calculations with the calculators above and saw the same thing. My numbers are perhaps a half an integer on the high side based on the calculators and my own sense of how I ran the numbers.

• Engadget – 15.34
• Gizmodo – 10.91
• Techcrunch – 8.58
• BoingBoing – 10.13
• Huffington Post – 10.49
• Lifehacker – 12.10
• ars technica – 14.97
• Beppe Grillo’s Blog – 10.17
• Mashable – 15.30
• TMZ – 9.89
• Seth Godin – 9.32
• ReadWriteWeb – 13.52
• ProBlogger – 13.90
• Google Blog – 15.42
• Treehugger – 12.80
• Smashing Magazine -12.06

The average Gunning fog index for all of the above blogs was 12.18, or the equivalent of a high school senior. Going in I expected the number would be lower. I was surprised to see numbers over 15 and some of the individual passages I checked were as high as 18 or 19. I’m not sure how much weight you’d want to put on these numbers, but I can say it was easier to read the paragraphs that had lower indexes than it was reading those with higher indexes.

Across the board it’s very common for writing that is meant for the general public to have an index around 11 or 12, with technology related content having indexes up to 15. The numbers above would agree.

I couldn’t calculate the Gunning fog for all the above blogs without being curious about my own blog. Taking three paragraphs from recent posts here resulted in a Gunning fog index of 10.38. I guess 10th graders and above are welcome.

Conclusion

Aside from the conclusion that I need to look for online calculators before spending the time to make manual calculations what does any of the above prove? Mostly if backs up the initial thought at the beginning of this post. If you want your blog to be more accessible and more widely read you need to write simply, or at least you need not to write too complex.

Whether it shows or not I am usually conscious of the words I’m using here. I will rewrite a few things to make them simpler and I try not use big words when they aren’t necessary. I may not be the most popular blogger and I may not have the largest audience, but I haven’t had many people tell me they couldn’t understand what’s written here. People may not agree with me or enjoy what I have to say, but at least they understand what I’m trying to get across.

If your blog is going to attract and hold a larger audience it’s going to do that based on the ideas you have to share and how far those ideas can spread. Before your ideas can spread across the web they need to be understood so you may want to think about the Gunning fog index and periodically check to see how easy or hard it might be to follow your writing.

Maybe your target market or your blogging voice calls for more complex writing, but odds are you’re looking to write at a level that can be understood by a high school junior or senior or in my case a high school sophomore.

If anyone wants to run numbers on some of the blogs above for comparison let me know. I’d be interested in seeing what you come up with and there’s at least a link in it from me to you. If you want to share the Gunning fog of your blog either try the manual calculation or use one of the calculators above. The calculator is easier, but having to read through the passages to count the words, sentences, and complex words will give you a better understanding of how the index works.

What’s your Gunning fog index? How much education do I need to read your blog?

Comments

"Anonymity is the enemy, whether it’s online or walking around a trade show with a clicker in your pocket."

I vehemently disagree with Seth’s statement.  Here’s why.

Seth’s viewpoint of "anonymity is the enemy" only works if one is secure: physically, financially and emotionally.  Unfortunately, there are still many, many people in the world where that is not the case.  Here are three:

• Whisteblowers
• Political Dissidents
• Victims of violent or family crime

For any of those groups, anonymity is the means through which they can effect change.

In some cases, for those groups, anonymity is the thing that’s keeping them alive, literally.  On that note, I want to make a shout out to the TOR Project.  The TOR site says:

"Hundreds of thousands of people around the world use Tor for a wide variety of reasons: journalists and bloggers, human rights workers, law enforcement officers, soldiers, corporations, citizens of repressive regimes, and just ordinary citizens. See the Who Uses Tor? page for examples of typical Tor users. See the overview page for a more detailed explanation of what Tor does, why this diversity of users is important, and how Tor works."

What Gizmodo did was a social hack, not unlike a flashmob or Santarchy. 

It was not a crime, as Seth called it. 

If someone turning off a TV is a crime to get up in arms about where you live, consider yourself very, very fortunate.

Comments

They came for the advance copy of Seth Godin’s new book, Meatball Sundae, and stayed for the keynote.

He opened by citing the history behind Josiah Wedgwood, a potter who Godin considered the person who created marketing when he opened a showroom in London for his pottery in the 18th Century. A 2004 book on Wedgwood called him “the first tycoon.”

Wedgwood layered sales and marketing on top of manufacturing; Godin said manufacturing is the heart of business, and that is where marketing opportunity can be found.

Godin also presented fourteen trends he considers current and important:

•  Direct Communication between business and consumers.
•  Consumers are louder than ever.
•  Authentic stories
•  Speed
•  The new marketplace
•  Outsourcing. If your job can be reduced to a manual