Baffled. Utterly baffled.
How much did you pay the music industry for the record player you bought 30 years ago? What percentage of your 15-year-old tape deck’s cost went to the music companies? And how much did the RIAA get when you bought your new Bose speakers?A big fat zero, obviously.Which is why I’m so utterly baffled by comments like this:
Zucker also revealed his company had asked for a cut of iPod sales - though the company receives no dividend from sales of record or CD players.”Apple sold millions of dollars worth of hardware off the back of our content and made a lot of money,” he said. “They did not want to share in what they were making off the hardware or allow us to adjust pricing.”
Almost. Literally. Unbelievable.What can you expect, I guess, from an industry that sues its customers, cheats its stars, eats its young talent for lunch, and is generally a disgusting, manipulative, and corrupting influence on popular culture.What a zero.
(il)Literate crime
Anyone who starts a market research report like this ought to be hanged at dawn, then drawn and quartered:
Following industry studies designed and conducted by Education Market Research (EMR) in 2003 and 2004 [which were sponsored by the Association of Educational Publishers (AEP) in 2003, and by the Association of Educational Publishers (AEP) and the National School Supply and Equipment Association (NSSEA) in 2004], and in 2005 and 2006, EMR fielded its fifth annual study of the size, growth rate, and current trends in the supplemental products market in the Spring of 2007.
51 words until the subject of the sentence shows up! Let me repeat that. 51 words until the subject of the sentence shows up!Annoying and incompetent.Naturally, it’s a report on the education industry …
Marketing: snail versus email
I’m looking at some interesting education marketing reports right now and found this interesting comment:
“We have tried combo programs, encouraging folks to go to our website and answer questions if they get the direct mail piece, and/or the e-mail to test which works better - and the e-mail always does!”
The reason, I’m sure, is context. When you get the email, you’re on your computer, and you’re just a click away from the website. But when you get the mail, you’re not … and it’s too much hassle to save the piece until you are.
Leopard fun
Saw this surprisingly accurate and funny description of a common Mac OS X problem that is now fixed in Leopard:
Another noticeable reason for everything being slightly faster is Leopard is that a lot of secondary tasks are delegated to their own thread, allowing more to be done in parallel rather than having the interface held up until a task is completed. One example is network servers in the Finder. If you’ve ever disconnected the network before ejecting a file share, you’ve no doubt felt the pain of having your entire Finder grind to a halt while the system sends out a search party looking for the missing disk. Normality doesn’t resume until all hope is lost, and the rescuers don’t seem to give up easy, even though they never have any chance in finding anything.All that’s gone in Leopard. Disconnect a file share, and the Finder remains responsive while it tries in vain to reconnect in a separate thread. It then simply pops up a disconnect notice. If you have your Mac on a network, that’s reason to buy Leopard in itself. The new Mail similarly benefits from multicore optimization.
Great description … glad it’s now fixed!
Feedyes? Feedno! Finding a working YouTube RSS Generator
I’m trying to create a feed for a page that has no feeds:http://youtube.com/results?search_query=serious+games&search=SearchFeedYes is supposed to be able to do that … but annoyingly, the site continually has technical errors that prevent me from making a feed. First of all, it doesn’t show steps 3 and 4 … after showing steps 1 and 2. And secondly, after following the instructions in step 2, it tells me that the URL is invalid … after just using it to create a perfectly good list of recent videos.Arggh …Dapper has issues as well. In fact, in total, I probably spent about 45 minutes fooling around with FeedYes and Dapper before finding a service that actually worked …The best I found for YouTube RSS is actually YouTube RSS Generator, which looks decided low-tech but gave me a perfectly functioning feed in about 25 seconds.
All 3 Wordpress blogs now imported!
Whoa.I now have all three of my former blogs (bizhack, art-n-artifice, and fishcrackers) imported into this uber-blog.The toughest one was bizhack, which had over 1400 posts and a 4.3 MB export file … 2.3 MBs over the Wordpress import limit.Wordpress import hackI had to use David Seah’s wordpress import hack to get it imported … which was interesting consider it was created for Wordpress 2.1 and the current version (which I’m using) is 2.3.If you’re doing this, be aware that you’ll need to search around a bit for the correct file locations.
Leadership @ work
I recently received a promotion, and I’ve been thinking about what it means to be a manager versus a leader, what kind of leadership I want to provide, and what kind of a leader do I want to grow to be …This is tough stuff, and I’m pretty sure I have a long way to go. But I think the critical piece is summed up in this advice that I found on PositiveSharing (the chief happiness officer’s blog):
A leader is best when the people are hardly aware of his existence,not so good when people stand in fear,worse, when people are contemptuous.Fail to honour people, and they will fail to honour you.But a good leader who speaks little,when his task is accomplished, his work done,the people say “We did it ourselves.”
The person who said that lived 2500 years ago in China: Lao Tzu.
Tags: leadership, office, work, lao tzu, john koetsier
Selling yourself
Pickthebrain has a post on selling yourself. I can personally attest that, after getting the qualifications and knowledge you need to succeed in your chosen field, being able to “sell yourself” is the most critical part of professional success. The highlights:
- Be Sold on Yourself
- Have a Saleable Package
- Be Positive and Enthusiastic
- Be Real and Authentic
I’d have to say the most important one, though, is not there. To me, it’s that day in and day out, you have to work hard, put your best foot forward, make those around you look good, and not care (too much) about who gets the credit.
Google has much better …
. . . Excel help than Excel.Every single time I need to find out how to do something in Excel, I try to figure it out from Excel help. Search usually gets me nowhere, but sometimes gives me a clue what I should actually be searching on. But the help I usually get is not very helpful.So I turn to Google, and usually on the first page of results, using the search terms that make sense to me (an admitted Excel weenie, and proud of it) I find the answer.Isn’t that bass-ackwards? Shouldn’t the best source of information about your product come from your company?
LinkedIn: fact meets fiction
I just got another LinkedIn connection request this morning. Every one has a little LinkedIn fact at the bottom, like this:
Fact: 3,414 CEOs use LinkedIn every day
As you know, since you’re a smart denizen of the blogosphere, whether something is a fact or not is a function of what kind of statement it is … not about whether it’s true.So here’s my version of that fact:
Fact: 3,414 people who claim to be CEOs use LinkedIn every day
That’s much better. None of the CEOs that I know personally have anywhere near enough time to be obsessively checking LinkedIn every single day.What about you?
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About
Sparkplug 9 is John Koetsier's blog on life, the universe, and everything,
but mostly the stuff you see big in the tags to the left.
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