The FuzzyBlog!
Marketing 101. Consulting 101. PHP Consulting. Random geeky stuff. I Blog Therefore I Am.

Tuesday, August 20, 2002

From Russell.  Too Damn Funny.  And also too damn true.  I mean can't you see Bill out there with a baseball bad viscously clubbing baby penguins. 5:37:30 PM  Google It!  comment []   IM Me About This

Ethics: Why Aren't Investors and Venture Capitalists Suing Market Research Firms? It isn't a secret that market research firms inflate numbers in order to sell market research reports.  In fact, as covered earlier this year in the Wall Street Journal, some research firms even write reports to order, notably www.aberdeen.com.  Even so, this statistic just shocked the heck out of me: In fact, IDC recently lowered its projections for the market, from sales of $17.9 billion to $3.9 billion, in 2005. That's a factor of 458% !!!  What kind of research is that where you change your mind by 458%?  "Uhhhh.  Duh.... We screwed up."  This was mentioned in an article on BEA's new move into the corporate data retrieval market amidst slowing growth in their core application server market.  Here's the cross reference: http://news.com.com/2100-1001-954432.html?tag=fd_lede We're all furious at different businesses that inflate their numbers.  But is it any different when market research firms do the same?  An awful lot of investment dollars are based on the work of a few research firms: IDC, Gartner, Dataquest, Giga, etc.  If there is deliberate misstatements at work here then the consequences, measured in terms of aggregate dollars, are on an MCI / Enron type scale. 2:20:31 PM  Google It!  comment []   IM Me About This

Something Unexpected: Scott's Radio    As the author of the O'Reilly Essential Blogging chapters on Radio, I clearly have a commercial interest in Radio.  You'd think that I'd want people to just buy the Essential Blogging book and NOT give content about Radio for free.  You'd think that but you'd be wrong.  I really want to see Radio do well along with great people like Jake and Lawrence.  And more documentation is pretty much always a frothy good thing for products. So... Inspiration struck me yesterday when I was digging through the 240 gigabytes of digital bile that I call a hard drive(s): O'Reilly cut a lot of my text on the Essential Blogging book.  (these are all labeled as "Missing")  Why not aggregate that content along with my previous writings on Radio and release it as a free book under the GNU Free Documentation License?  This content still gets tons of hits from Google so it's clearly useful.  A quick demand (ok gentle request) to my partner, Gretchen, for "A really cool cover" and within about an hour, she IM'd me the graphic at left.  And I've been in hard core content massage since 3:37 am on this oh so soggy Boston day.  I won't tell you that this content is perfect -- there are clearly some broken links and other editing style things that need to get done.  But there is a lot of content and it's useful.  It'll get improved more over time but following the Open Source mantra of "Release Early and Release Often", I give you: Scott's Radio ==> Read Stories <== 10:02:35 AM  Google It!  comment []   IM Me About This

Does Anyone Buy this Stuff?  Does Anyone Believe It? Direct mail (junk) marketing techniques applied to the web.  Certainly not new but sad, IMHO. http://www.trafficdynamo.com/ Unquestionably the antithesis of how I approach marketing.  Feels sleazy, IMHO.  Sigh.  Makes me embarassed to have anything to do with marketing. 5:34:45 AM  Google It!  comment []   IM Me About This