Jake Ludington’s Digital Lifestyle

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We’ve all been on the receiving end of an employee following company policy at one time or another. For me, the instance that sticks out as most obvious to me was an occasion when I went to cash a check at the bank I visited every week, only to discover I’d left my driver’s license back at the office. The teller recognized me, but because it was bank policy not to cash a check without proper identification, I was out of luck. My lunch hour schedule prevented me from having time to go back and get my ID. Sure it was my fault for not having my ID with me, but I was no stranger to the people who worked at the bank. I was left with a bad feeling that I remember many years later.

Falling into the company policy trap can be even worse for small companies, because the the stakes are much higher. To use a hypothetical company as an example, lets say I own a video hosting service that competes with YouTube. My service charges a monthly subscription fee for a bunch of advanced features you can’t get from YouTube. Because of some exclusive distribution partnerships we worked out, our service also requires you to launch your video channel with at least 5 video segments. The 5 video policy was put in place because our distribution partners are concerned that too many video publishers launch with one video, realize it’s too much work, and abandon posting videos, which makes their network look bad. Your channel won’t be visible to the world until you have 5 video segments uploaded, although we will do the necessary configuration so that you’re live as soon as the 5 videos are ready to go.

To continue with my hypothetical example, lets say you are an artist who uses video as your medium. For your current project, you want to shoot a three minute video at exactly the same location, starting at the exact same time every day for an entire year. You want your video channel to go live starting on January 1 and continue throughout the year. Part of the experience of your project is that you need people to view videos from day 1. You can’t launch with the 5 videos I require, because our requirements do not match your vision. While we clearly spell out the requirements to everyone who joins our service, you contact customer support and request that we make your video channel live on January 1 with only 1 video.

There are two ways my video company could proceed. Customer support could respond that our policy is to require 5 videos and we refuse to make an exception. As a result you might take your business elsewhere and tell other artists that we aren’t a viable option for creative people. The other thing we could do is engage with you more directly, clarify what our concerns are about why we require 5 videos, and recognize that your goals are sound even though they don’t match up with our policy. Choosing the later course probably means you’re going to tell more people what a great service our company offers because we empowered you to succeed with your vision./p pBy being flexible in company policy when it makes sense, you can build a stronger company with rabidly loyal customers. In the hypothetical example I use, the 5 video policy exists to create a better experience for distribution partnerships, however, in the case of your art project, our company can have reasonable confidence that you will follow through because you have a track record for doing interesting art projects.

What about situations where an exception is made and the customer fails to live up to their end? There’s always that risk, but every business decision involves some risk, it’s a matter of assessing which ones will get the company closer to its goals.

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I want great journalism to stick around. I don’t care whether big news outlets like New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal are the source of that journalism or something new and better. What I do know is that Washington Post reporter Ian Shapira is asking the wrong questions about how to news outlets compete with the likes of Gawker and Huffington Post in the online space.

In a piece titled either How Gawker Ripped Off My Newspaper Story or the Death of Journalism (Gawker Edition), Ian Shapira outlines the effort he put into writing a story about business coach Anne Loehr and the subsequent “theft” by Gawker in a blog post.

The major complaint Shapira has against Gawker is that they reference too much of his story in the Gawker article. I tend to agree with the issue of quantity, but find the solution (requiring Gawker (or anyone) to pay to reference more than a certain amount of a story to be a solution that only lines the pockets of lawyers who do the prosecution on violators. The reason Gawker works is because they neatly summarize things people few people want to spend their full attention on. Most people don’t have time for the full in-depth story. We want quick news hits that allow us to comment and move on to the next thing. Better Solution: Washington Post should build a better Gawker. WP could be giving people the full Shapira article and simultaneously be running their own Gawker competitor, extracting the best parts of an article with a link over to the full deal. Shapira could even be the blogger that summarizes his own article in that context, possiblly including a juicy tidbit or two that didn’t make the editor’s cut.

Overquoting on Gawker’s part resulted in too much of Shapira’s followup dedicated to a discussion of revised copyright laws, which is a misguided solution to the problem. Instead of focusing on how to crack down on the length of quoting, Mr. Shapira ought to be asking what Washington Post and others big news outlets can do to attract more of the audience that opts to start their news day at a Gawker or Huffington Post type outlet. As the guy who covers the Millennial generation for WP, Shapira might even be the guy who can find the solution to competing against Gawker.

A good starting point would be a comparison of the barriers to reading created by Gawker vs. the barriers to reading created by the Washington Post. In the case of Gawker, the Web reader has no barriers, you just hit their page and start reading. With the Washington Post, at various points in navigating their site, reading is interrupted to attempt forced registration. This interruption in reading implies that the primary business of the Washington Post is to collect user accounts, not display ads on as many pages as possible. If the Washington Post can’t give up the nag completely, then at the very least they should allow me to skip it and keep reading or rely on registering people when they comment (which is what Gawker does).

Another issue that leaps out at me is figuring out how newsrooms can make better use of technological advances. Example one: Shapira complains about an abridged biography that took him 3,000 words of note to acquire. While I’m sure some fact checking is in order, I got the same info reading the about page on AnneLoehr.com. A little advance research on the Web can save hours invested in gathering a story. Example two: Shapira reports spending four hours transcribing Anne Loehr’s presentation he attended as part of his research gathering. One word here: Outsource! When I need a transcription, I send my audio to CastingWords.com or something similar because I don’t have the time to transcribe. If my little one-person operation can afford that, surely Washington Post could be getting a discounted rate on transcriptions in bulk. The Post reporters could be spending that extra time engaging with readers in social media outlets or creating the blog summaries of their articles.

Another complaint in the article about Gawker is the failure of referring links from site’s like Gawker to prevent layoffs and contraction. That’s not Gawker’s fault. Just like classified advertising used to be a major source of revenue that supported journalism at newspapers, the new model needs a new sugar daddy. In my 5 things to drive online newspaper revenue I propose that newspapers need to get serious about being the source for online travel information about their geographic locale. When I search online for travel info, the local paper is never the best source of information, despite travel being one of the best paying online ad categories.

To summarize: If WP wants to beat Gawker, they need to:
1) Consider readers first by reducing nag screens
2) Embrace technology to create a more agile staff
3) Adopt an aggressive effort in travel to drive online revenue

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Something about the ongoing discussion about bloggers, reviews, and whether or not the FTC should have rules of disclosure for bloggers rubs me the wrong way. I’m a blogger, for lack of a better description, and I do review products. Sometimes those products are sent to me by companies, sometimes I buy them, and for some software products I sometimes use the free trial to assess whether I’d recommend it or not. I disclose where I get products when I review them, but you will rarely see me write a negative review. This isn’t because I care about protecting sponsorships, I’m sure there’s more money to be made in the butt kissing business, but I wouldn’t sleep well at night knowing I became a glorified product pitchman. Almost without exception I only write reviews of products I’d be willing to purchase, because I don’t want to waste your time with junk.

In the New York Times yesterday, Pradna Joshi writes an article titled Approval by a Blogger May Please a Sponsor, where she seems to be criticizing the practice of not writing negative reviews by stating of Classymommy.com author Colleen Padilla:

But unlike postings in most journalism outlets or independent review sites, most companies can be assured that there will not be a negative review: if she does not like a product, she simply does not post anything about it.

Maybe Colleen Padilla is legitimately worried about losing sponsors. Maybe Pradna Joshi hasn’t spoken to fellow New York Times journalist to see the long list of products he’s never written about good or bad, because a reviewer only has so much time in the day for products. And maybe because Pradna Joshi simply writes the stories assigned by an editor, there’s no real understanding of why any reviewer doesn’t bother with a review (positive or negative) for every product they see.

Here are a few of the reasons I don’t waste time on negative reviews:

You have a finite amount of time for what I write. I want to make sure I’m not wasting your time by telling you about stuff that sucks.

I have a limited amount of time to write. While it can feel cathartic to rip apart a lousy product, in general writing a negative review means I spent a bunch of time on something I don’t like. Since I don’t have an editor assigning me articles, I’m going to devote my writing time to things I like.

Negative attention is still attention. This may be the most important reason I don’t write about products I hate. If I think a product is lousy why would I want to draw attention to it? My exception to this last point is writing words of caution about things that might cause harm – I will take the time to issue a warning if I think something might damage your computer.

What’s your take? Should I be writing more negative reviews and spending less time on telling you about cool stuff?

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I follow lots of searches on Twitter and happened upon one denying some guy his right to learn how to lie on a resume. His grievance is none of the search results for How to Lie on a Resume actually turn up any advice. He’s absolutely right, learning to lie on your resume is a tricky thing. The key to any lie is the truth it contains, so use your language skills creatively and you’re sure to succeed at lying on your resume.

Brandon has some great thought provoking phrases in what I would call the ultimate guide to lying on your resume. I don’t think that’s what he intended, so I’ll analyze a few of his gems as a great starting point:

Trying to downplay your lack of employment or temporary self-employment in your quest for a sales job, try this: “Worked with a constricted budget was careful to leverage sales”

Need a temporary PhD? A search engine won’t notice the period (or the rest of the word) when you randomly add the sentence, “Tested water Ph.Determined amount of chlorine to add accounting for the volume of water.” Bonus reference to accounting helps you rank better in resume search engines too.

Under-qualified for that Java programming position? Make up for it with clever keyword usage: “Played Elf Bowling and other Java games.” I’m going to co-opt this one and suggest that rather than admitting to playing games, you might state you did “scalability testing of Java applications through hours of rigorous testing.” This not only sounds better, it gets away from admitting to game play.

Notice that none of these things are outright lies, they are merely creative uses of language. Think of them more as positioning statements, not lies, however, if you are caught lying, it’s not my fault. You simply weren’t creative enough. ;) Go forth and update your resume.

Feel free to share your resume lies in the comments below.

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The business behind JakeLudington.com is a one person operation. The one person being me. My brother jumps in and saves my butt on occasion, but largely the decisions, both bad and good, are made solely by me. This works well most of the time, but as things grow sometimes undoing decisions I made two or three years ago cause some serious growing pains.

The month of January 2009 is definitely one of the most painful I can remember. I’m gradually making updates to the way JakeLudington.com functions so that pages load faster, all browsers display the pages well, and in general so that as site traffic continues to increase people will have a good experience. I’d rather be focusing on writing articles, answering questions, and making some new videos, but instead I’m upgrading and then unbreaking things as I upgrade.

Why am I telling you all this? Partly because it may have impacted you in some way. For instance, if you sent me a question in the past week, I may not have gotten the email. If you’ve been waiting a week or more for an answer, by all means, submit your question again. If you tried to download a file and it didn’t work, you might want to try again – many things are more stable now than they were two weeks ago. The other reason I bring this up is I’d love to hear from other people who have experienced growing pains in running a one-person or small company. What was one thing you did that made a big difference or changed your company for the better?

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I just got the renewal notice for my Google Apps Premier Edition account, which means I’ve almost hit the one year mark of relying on Google for various aspects of my JakeLudington.com domain. The question is, will I renew?

It took me almost 9 months of that year to get around to enabling the email portion of my account, which essentially moved all my JakeLudington.com mail off of my web server and onto a Gmail server. When I finally did it, I was thrilled. Google Apps does a better job of filtering mail than Outlook 2007. By filtering, I don’t mean handling spam, I mean sorting mail in a logical fashion. I don’t believe in inbox zero, I’m a firm believer in smart sorting of mail to get things categorized without touching anything I don’t need to. Gmail rocks for email sorting. For that reason alone I will definitely renew my Premier Edition account. Having Calendar and other domain functionality tied in is gravy.

Outsourcing my email server may be one of the smartest decisions I’ve ever made as a small business owner.

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…at least on the subjects of Yahoo’s entry into the content business and Google’s supposed promise to never be in the content business. Jason’s suggesting a boycott of Yahoo’s YPN ad network over today’s announcement of Yahoo’s new women’s portal, Shine, which I first read about on TechCrunch earlier today. As Jason puts it:

Isn’t the point of the Yahoo Publisher Network to support and grow publishers and newspapers!??! What next a consumer electronics site to compete with Engadget and Gizmodo, or a sports site to compete with ESPN and Sportsline? A gossip site to compete with PerezHIlton and Gawker?

Jason seemingly forgets Yahoo has been competing in these areas for awhile, with a number of tech blogs, the Yahoo Sports Blog, and celebrity gossip site omg!.

And to the point that Google will never be in the content business, the Knol announcement in December 2007 seems to negate that idea. While it’s not live yet, Google yields over 1 million results on the topic, which makes it hard to believe Jason has forgotten it already.

I find it a big so-what that Yahoo is double-dipping from both the content and advertising side of the fence. They’ve been a content company for ages, as a top destination for both news and finance, it seems nature they’d expand on that success. I voted with my wallet on YPN ages ago when I found the payouts to be dramatically lower than several other ad network options (including Google Adsense).

In my mind, a Yahoo with solid offerings from both sides of the game is better for content publishers like Gawker, Gear Live Media, or even a Conde Nast or small newspaper conglomerate, because it makes them a viable company for buying out smaller content players with a track record for being able to monetize them. So if the content guys want out, Yahoo might be a likely candidate for writing the check.

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According to an article on TechCrunch from last night, venture capital funding for bloggers is being handed out like LSD-laced candy on a San Francisco Halloween night. Millions of dollars are going to boosting the valuations of blogs that are, not surprisingly, largely about the tech industry. Mike’s suggesting that bloggers taking these drugs funds are selling themselves short and limiting potentially more valuable opportunities in the future. Instead he proposes a dream team scenario, where TechCrunch teams up with favorite bloggers to build a mega business staged to become the next CNET. Mike’s wrong – blogger’s who blog about tech and tech business should take the money and run. The space is already over-crowded with smart people who are limited to making me too posts and analyzing the analysis of other bloggers because there simply isn’t enough news to go around.

The real problem here is venture capital throwing money at the wrong types of blogs. The blogs getting money are the ones VCs understand – tech and investing blogs. if they want the 10x multiple to pay off, they need to look outside the tech-ecochamber at blogs that are different. Smart money would bet on the same topics that are huge on television (notice tech on television is a joke). Lifestyle topics like gardening, travel, home repair, and food are where a huge percentage of advertising dollars are spent both online and off. These are also areas of wide appeal to 10 of millions of people. If venture capital wants massive ROI, they should be worshiping at the feet of the best bloggers in lifestyle topics, not taking the boring bet on tech. Think Conde Nast not Ziff Davis. Think HGTV and DIY not G4 and CNBC.

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As most of the people who know me already know, I haven’t had a “real job” in years. Instead I’ve been happily helping people solve frustrating computer problems through my blog and email newsletter. This provides a great living, I get to set my own hours, and while there’s a temptation to work more than I should, I also have the advantage of taking a few weeks off when I need to, without significantly impacting my income. In addition to knowing that I’m helping people everyday, I have the added bonus of not being stuck doing the same thing day in and day out. I can

There’s plenty of room for you to do the same thing if you want to. I’m more than happy to provide whatever guidance I can to people who want to strike out on their own. I ran across Rat Race Rebellion this morning, thanks to this Today Show interview with Dr. Danielle Babb, author of Making Money Teaching Online.

Rat Race Rebellion appears to be a great resource for people who are looking for legitimate online work (as in not the get rich quick kind). The spirit of Rat Race Rebellion is in line with 4 Hour Work Week, in that you’re leaving behind the corporate world to pursue something you enjoy on a schedule more fitting with your personal lifestyle. While I think the interview is a little basic in it’s coverage of what you need to do to work from home successfully, Dr. Babb is targeting a specific type of working from home.

If you’re willing to take the get rich slow approach to making money online, here’s a very simplistic formula to join the Rat Race Rebellion:

1) Keep you day job

2) Find a topic you’re passionate about (if you aren’t passionate about the topic don’t bother, you’ll quit).

3) Register a Domain name and find a cheap hosting provider (don’t use hosted services like Wordpress.com or Blogger.com)

4) Post 2-3 things about your topic on the blog every day. Be sure to link to interesting articles and videos you find related to your topic.

5) Post at least 1 video a week showing people how to do something related to your topic.

6) Provide easy ways for people to subscribe to your blog via RSS and email. Feedburner provides some great free tools to get you started.

7) Read other people who are active in niches similar to yours, comment when appropriate on their blogs. You can track them easily using FeedDemon.

8) Study online tips on how to get more traffic to your blog and videos. Implement these tips in a way that fits with your personal goals.

9) Sign up for advertising solutions like Adsense, Commission Junction, Shareasale.com, etc. Implement the advertising on your site.

10) When the advertising revenue from your blog is more than your current job and enough to cover things like health insurance and other perks you currently get from your employer, consider leaving your job and blogging full time. This last step will likely take 2 years to achieve, maybe longer depending on many variables.

Notice I placed advertising at the bottom of this list. While the ad revenue is how you will make money with this approach, it’s far more important to have a solid foundation before you worry about how that foundation will make you money.

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There was a recent discussion on the Yahoo Videoblogging discussion list about hiring SEO services to get your videos more views. While there might be a case for this, there are a number of things you can do quickly to help get yourself more views (and a little search engine optimization) without paying someone else. Online marketing guru Jim Kukral, host of The Daily Flip, asked me if I’d shoot some video explaining the tips, so here’s part one. They sound like common sense when you hear them, but that’s largely because they are. Most people who complain about their video views aren’t following most or all of these guidelines, so here’s part one…

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Tips 1 – 5:

Be interesting – This may be the most important tip of all. If your videos are lame, no one will watch them no matter what else you do.

Write good titles – When you post a video online, the best way for people to find it is through the text related to the post. Titles are the foundation of good text. If you write a succinct clear title, people will find it easier to associate your video with what they are looking for.

Include text on the page – A good title isn’t enough, you also need supporting text. If you don’t write good supporting text, search engines won’t index your video well and it won’t be found easily for related searches.

Get an Email Subscription – Many video bloggers swear by using RSS with enclosures as the primary means of acquiring subscribers. While that’s an important option, it’s also important to simply provide an email subscription for those people who want to be reminded when you have something new.

Embed the video – Make it easy for people to watch your video by embedding it on the page you write about it. Don’t make people download the video. Don’t make them open a new browser window. Give people what they want in as few steps as possible.

BTW, subscribe to The Daily Flip, there’s even better stuff than this.

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