Thursday, July 20, 2006

Marketing products through online learning. Interesting post and observation by Jeremy, although I am not as cynical about this as he is. Providing value to people, no strings attached, is still a great viral tool. If you do it right, and don't spam those who download your content, you will do very well. (Edited Jeremy's post) Free Training (Buy Our Stuff) Interesting use of online learning materials for marketing products by Nike Bauer . Their current hockey-themed ad campaign focuses on off-season training, and they've included short, high-quality instructional videos for at least 60 different excercises (click "Training" in the top toolbar, then "Exercises"). They can be downloaded as well. To get a full training program ("My Regimen"), you have to register ...  - Jeremy [HeadspaceJ: Instructional Design and Technology Blog] 1:59:41 PM

Manage your own expectations. Along the lines of the famous "90% of everything is crud" rule of thumb for content consumers, there is now a "1% rule" for content providers. 1% of Web users create, 10% of them comment, and the other 89% lurk. Something to keep in mind when you get frustrated by low response rates. What is the 1% rule? - It's an emerging rule of thumb ... (Charles Ar/Guardian). Source:   Guardian Author:   Charles Ar Link:   http://technology.guardian.co.uk/weekly/story/0… [Techmeme] 1:55:59 PM

Clean up your system. (Entry from Digg edited heavily.) Microsoft Releases New Cleanup Utility. The User Profile Hive Cleanup utility tracks down all those little left-over bits from software installations and uninstalls and kills them for you, thus decreasing shut down time significantly.   (via Digg) [technology filter] 1:50:17 PM

Keeping up with the conversation. Another really useful online service -- and it's free, so far. (Entry from TechCrunch edited) CoComment upgrades, now worth using. CoComent is a popular browser tool for tracking conversations in the comments sections of blogs. It catches the comments you’ve made around the web and comments made after yours. Most important is that CoComment will now track all comments made after yours - not just comments made by other CoComment users. New player in the space Commentful does the same thing but appears to offer a simpler feature set for more casual use (30 item tracking limit, blinking notification of every new comment). Another new feature is called “track this conversation” - enabling you to track comments on blog posts that you haven’t commented on yourself. Still another very cool new feature is the MetaConversation option, which lets you create a comment space tied to a page but off-site in order to leave comments about a page that doesn’t support commenting. [TechCrunch] 1:45:55 PM

A terabyte of storage for your home office. For $900 you can store an awful lot of content. Useful for creative-type home entrepreneurs. A Drive Big Enough to Hold a Family’s Data. Maxtor’s Shared Storage II is a network drive that can hold up to 72 hours of high-resolution video or 768,000 photos. By JOHN BIGGS. [NYT > Technology] 1:41:11 PM

Publishing your work. Many home-based entrepreneurs have tried publishing e-Books, with varying success. But what about those cases in which nothing will do but an actual hardbound book, or where your target audience would prefer to get an actual physical product? Now you can use professional-quality publishing software online and publish for any size market, from one person on up. Good summary of the developments and who's providing this kind of service. Technology Rewrites the Book. New services allow print runs of a few, or just one, for customers ranging from aspiring authors to anyone who needs a bound document. By PETER WAYNER. [NYT > Technology] 1:38:26 PM

© Copyright 2006 Bill Brandon.