All Posts By

Jon Gatrell

Top 5 Trollin: Alert Rich, jus utendi et abutendi & the proletariat

So I continue to monitor my Google alerts around Top 5, I tracked top 12 (no traffic) and I tracked Top 7 as well – 1 hit in months. Readers are some of the most insightful folks and other writers do love their Top 5 list and more like to refer to other peoples Top 5 lists – creativity is alive and well! What qualifies as a reasonable list? Wit? Detail? A cool Title?

The most reasonable list according to many authors who linked to it, is the Top 5 SEO and Link Building Challenges for 2008 which have cluttered my inbox. (Uh oh – I have possibly broken the linking rules for good [tag]SEO[/tag]!) I’m so appreciative for the ideas of others, but I am continuously curious about what is of interest and what is not for readers, because while I appreciate that a good deal of words were written – I don’t know why so many people linked back.

The other list of multiple linking was the Top 5 Tips on Making Machinima, apparently a type of gamer movie thing. The most useful list I found was the Top 5 greasemonkey scripts to pimp my new GMail, but I don’t have any idea what to do with it. Wish I did as that FB GMail scripts, looks like a cool thing – maybe. Have you installed GMail scripts? Anywho, back to what you want to read or not, my random retort to a very challenging Canadian – Paul.

At Paulitics a very interesting Top5 List – Top 5 Things I saw in America which, as a Canadian, freaked me right out! First I say only 5? Then, I read them and I thought – really those 5? Fundamentally we have this thing called free speech in the US, it is some inalienable right thing, which was further outlined in a thing called the Bill of Rights and it appears 4 of your complaints are around that, which are fairly important things to American folk.

(tongue firmly planted in cheek for the majority of the rest of the post)

While I think your blog’s name is clever – I think your response is a little too Canadian. A little too “our currency is at parity and we can now buy the goods of the bourgeoisie without doing math” uppity member of the proletariat. A little too “can I get some mayonnaise for my French Fries – no Mayo?!?! How about some vinegar or gravy?” My response is really just in response to item #4, in your inverse ordered list:

A breakfast creation in upstate New York called “Stuffed French Toast”. What does “Stuffed French Toast” entail, you naïve non-American might ask? It’s French Toast (which, keep in mind is cooked in butter) stuffed with bacon, eggs and processed cheese (which they proudly call ‘American processed cheese’, I presume, to distinguish it from real cheese which could, after all, be French and/or offer unAmerican nutritional content). But here’s the kicker: on top of your “Stuffed French Toast” cooked in butter, you will find… a square of butter.

I don’t know what to say, except to create my own retort in the form of a Top 5 list.

 

Top 5 Reasons Stuffed French Toast Should be Awarded the most American Recipe Ever.

 

  • Everything is better cooked in butter!
  • Americans, specifically the xenophobe set, can’t accept anything French without improving upon it and topping with a pat of butter as a is a great start, since cooking with butter is not the same as topping it with butter.
  • Processed cheese isn’t just tasty – it is also an optimal cholesterol delivery device which is perfectly square and melts more evenly than real cheddar cheese. Completely american – style over substance.
  • Bacon is the meat of champions and pork products are best served wrapped in a bread product.
  • Eggbeaters are always a heart smart alternative, if not available, ain’t no never mind since Zocor is just a co-pay away.

But I must say, I did enjoy Paul’s Marx-to-English Dictionary post, so I’ve added you to my reader, mainly so I can reflect on my Workers World days. Thanks for the list Paul and the fun, I’ll keep reading!

January 11, 2008 by
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From the stream: What do you expect from Twitter?

I’ve decided to begin leveraging Twitter as a source for research and extending my general awareness of the good stuff folks are producing/sharing with/for the community. I try and do Top 5 tweets, but this will be a little different, this will be a wander through information and concepts I never would have found out without Twitter. Thanks to Gaping Void, I found Confused of Calcutta, by JP Rangaswami and navigated my way to what he thought he would find on Twitter.

Over time every site, tool and network I’ve used/participated in ultimately changes from what I originally thought it would be, since I share similar, but different, relationships on many of these platforms I get different community views of content. I’m not sure what I expected to get from Twitter, but here is what I think it is good for:

For me: See what, where and to some extent why things are going on. I’ve been able to get a broader understanding of social media, marketing and news than I normally get on my own. Twitter is the by far the most diverse network I participate in.

People I’m Following: It give me a personalized view of micro-content which folks think is important. It creates a set of focused interactions where slivers of life and content are shared passively – it’s my choice to do something on the pushed content. I share weather, location and food, but others are more pervasive with their usage. Questions, Blog posts and human filtered news.

People Following Me: I have no idea what they are expecting, hopefully not that much, but I try to make this the medium where my life shines through, more so than any other platform I leverage.

There are a great deal of tools out there and all have different ways to be implemented by a given user, but key appears to be community oriented, as Mukund points out by posting Wodtke’s lengthy preso which winds through identity, reputation and relationships as attributes of communities, but also as markets.

January 6, 2008 by
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Human Intervention: markets in the making

So I spent some time understanding a little more the impact of social media over the holidays, basically in response to the online norm piece and a comment on art from gapingvoid guy, [tag]Hugh MacLeod[/tag].   People who interact online can impact online markets and untimately offline concerns as well.  O’Reilly had a [tag]Bill Janeway[/tag], from [tag]investment banking[/tag] firm [tag]Warburg Pincus[/tag], quote on the [tag]Money:Tech[/tag] conference which is fairly relevant in context of human interaction’s impact on financial activity:

The timeliness of this Conference is NOT only because “web 2.0” technologies and business models have reached critical mass in the financial markets. It is also because, as driven by the web more generally, the frontier between human and machine-decision making has become radically problematic. First, quantitative approaches in trading, pricing, valuation, asset definition vastly expanded the domain for machine decision-making. But then the humans struck back, by refusing to act like the mindless molecules that the models driving machine decision-making required. The self-reflective, behavioral attributes of human market participants is now driving back that frontier, requiring innovations in every aspect of financial market processes, beginning with techniques of risk measurement and risk management. When price is an inverse function of [tag]liquidity[/tag] and liquidity is an inverse function of price certainty, the recursive loop can only be broken by human intervention and action

Wow – what a mouthful and insightful – people impact markets. The significant investment in optimized algorythm based business models online may have a challenger – human interaction as it relates to online advertising.

Changed search models, content availability and pervasive shared content may ultimately make Feedburner’s (Google) adverpublishing platform which best serves as a sliver markets to a high value market channel at some point in the future?   While not necessarily the mainstream population, active online human decision makers continue to collectively impact markets, one might say communities.   Facebook, Twitter or others represent segments of market influencers and makers. Most [tag]Facebook valuation[/tag] discussions all essentially acknowledge a significant market segmentation asset.

Communities as Market Makers

The current underpinnings of the global social media infrastructure (Xobni, [tag]Utterz[/tag], Twitter, [tag]Plaxo[/tag] [tag]LinkedIn[/tag], [tag]Flickr[/tag], [tag]Flock[/tag]…) are establishing market definitions, definitions of buyer classes in their highly attributed/user extended data model.   So that begets the question as to how does a collective commonality define a market? Are there bookmark markets? Blog markets? “Group” Markets?

It’s reasonable to infer this is in fact the case. Sites/Platforms such a Digg,  writing cabals creating content and individuals bring together friends and randoms around a common set of attributes which should they sustain overtime may in fact create micro-markets. Not a believer?  Go to Gizmodo – That IS a Gizmodo market.

Sure advertising is inherently audience biased and to that end the delivery vehicle has just changed, but can the vehicles actually begin to deliver value add services – access to branded public information, focusedcontent and web service community tools across an interoperable network.  Imagine it – share attributes (friends, content, services…) could be managed through a unified market based UI – the Facebook user who likes cooking, the Truemors reader who looks up his 401k balance on the truemors interface – there are all kinds of abstract concepts and extensions. Once the social media markets mature from their currently narrowly banded spiky reality, these may be the only advertising markets – community focused views of online commerce, communication and service consumption.

So now on to the the abstract thought to end the article.  Does an individual define the market or an individual’s relationships?  If it’s the latter, Facebook may be under valued and the usability race has begun!

January 5, 2008 by
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Things I have already learned in 2008: Check Out Blog

So I’m one of those odd ducks that actually looks forward those moments when I run into one of those “I don’t/didn’t know moments” – these are opportunities, not moments to dodge. I’ve doing a bunch of random research the past couple of weeks and had only modest time to do anything with the holiday’s thrown in, but I’ve already have some interesting things I have actually already realized or learned in the past couple of days, but mainly I thought I would talk about the Wal-Mart blog.

Check Out Blog is an amazingly well written blog with an interesting set of characters. ( Go Rand! [tag]Sustainability[/tag] is good, I’ve been [tag]compact fluorescent[/tag] for years and not recycling is essentially a crime in Ann Arbor, so I got real good at it.) Man I wish it wasn’t a Wal-Mart blog, because I got a little jaded and told myself “try to give it a chance”. So I decided to dig into the authors because the authors look so happy – not unlike the Wal-Mart greeter. I’m confident that there was some be a Wal-Mart blogger contest which was only extended to buyers and merchandisers after reading their profiles, but the lady who checked me out late night in Alpharetta probably shouldn’t be a blogger.

As I continued to dig through profiles, I quickly learned, there has to be a ghostwriter somewhere in the mix, but that is not a bad thing – take Alex Cook‘s profile with the following statement:

In layman’s terms, I work with a group of professional buyers that are responsible for buying all the pc’s (and cool stuff that plugs into the PC’s) for the Wal-Mart stores in the U.S.

So as a technologist, I couldn’t think of keyboards and mice as cool things that plug into a computer, so I browsed walmart.com and indeed found “cool” things to plug into my PC, like the mouse below.

I agree, resting my hand on a picture of my family on holiday could be considered cool, providing I was put in a time machine and was able to plug it into my rad as hell 486 Hewlett Packard while scorching my way online at 14.4 with my new mouse resting on a mouse pad with a picture of my college dog Chumley. But the best bio is Tif’s.

Tifanie Van Laar

Author For Gaming

 

About Tifanie Van Laar

I am the [tag]video game software[/tag] buyer for Wal-Mart, but before starting this role, I did not own a single video game or [tag]video game platform[/tag]. Since that time, I have joined the legions of game players across the globe and proudly sit in the corner clicking away on my NDS while my boxer dogs, Makeda & Rohan, watch with disdain because I’m not paying attention to them. I have been a buyer with Wal-Mart for more than 8 years and have bought a vast array of items from movies to paint. I greatly enjoy my role with the company that harvested me out of the [tag]University of Arkansas[/tag] of which I am a very proud alumni….Woo Pig Sooie, Go Hogs!

Not only does she have an inner gamer, she likes football and was apparently harvested, like corn – ahh fall is such a fun time in Arkansas. All that is required for an all-in demographic win is a NASCAR reference, which oddly doesn’t exist on the blog – I searched. While the rules of blogging and the concept of transparency for corporate blogging might be fuzzy, outside of sustainability man, the personalities of the blog are just right. Kinda a Goldilocks approach to authors.

The Point of this Post

Wal-Mart has actually done a great job, despite my jabs at the authors. The team at Check Out have created a platform for collaboration, easily understood content and provides a human aspect to an otherwise less than human organization that used geographic information systems and analysis to destroy downtown Americana. As I read the profiles the other thing I notice was folks work their a long time – how many employers have folks with this type of tenure 7, 13, or 14 years? Can’t be a bad company when folks, like Danielle Pribbernow, “look forward to a long career” there and with a name like Pribbernow there has to be endless fun in meetings. “Ok now let’s plan for the next steps now, no I really mean now – like Pribbernow damn it!” Ok maybe there aren’t a bunch of things do with the name, but I like saying the name. Say it three times fast.

So kudo’s to WM for their efforts at Check Out, while I’m not sure I’m good with their assertion that all lanes are open, I’m definitely good with such a large company trying to engage their customers in a dialogue by understanding the following:

Know you audience – The most likely readers are the gamers, so produce content mainly for them. A great deal of folks who want to save the environment read blogs so put something out there for them. A targeted approach to extend the brand identity to be a more eco-friendly and Rand does that well, What is your PSP?

Don’t Overextend – They don’t try and be thought leaders, just factoid folks who don’t seem to sell that much, but provide information about the products. The type of stuff I might ask in a store from a Wal-Mart team member should I actually be able to locate one. IDEA: Put the blog on Kiosks in-store to help answer questions, locate products and take applications, multiple purposes will help prop up the ROI.

January 5, 2008 by
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