As I was spreading the peanut butter on the wrong side of the bread this morning, I thought, hmm… why does this Skippy jar look familiar?
PopWatchers and Skippy Peanut Butter, twins separated at birth
It’s because it looks just like my new site’s design, PopWatchers.com. My site and Honey Roasted Skippy Peanut Butter are twins separated at birth.
Hey, wait a minute. This blog is orange too! What’s going on with my color choices? < scratches head >
{ 0 comments }
Ben Huh tells Michelle Waldorf how he lost his leg
Ben Huh spoke informally at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco on May 5. About 40 attendees got to ask Ben questions about his super popular website business, the Cheezburger Network, which owns Icanhascheezburger and the FAIL blog. According to Quantcast, the Cheezburger Network’s blogs get 11.9M global visitors a month.
Ben explained that his staff does not create the content of his sites. Everything is user submitted, from the uploaded photos to the captions created by the LOL builder feature.
He starts with a popular internet meme and builds a site around the meme. Users popularize the content through social media. When asked by the audience if he had any trouble with copyright infringement, he replied, “No one owns a meme. It’s owned by the public.”
His staff continues to explore new memes. What he thought would be a huge hit, failed immediately. But the “stupid idea” for If Shoes Could Kill started with a million hits.
It was great to hear Ben’s thoughts on his business. I hope he can find a better leg prosthetic soon. … Well, maybe someone with an LOL builder can help me create a funny ending to this post. 
{ 0 comments }
There were 8 hours of non-stop startup insights at the Lean Startup Intensive held Day 1 at the Web 2.0 Expo May 3-5. The strategies and business metrics presented were enough for a 2 year MBA program.
These Lean Startup soundbites were the most retweeted:
1. If my iteration cycle is 1 week and yours is 3 weeks, I can be pretty stupid and still beat the crap out of you. Dave McClure – 500Hats
Execute. Quickly build minimum products to test your customer assumptions. Once you get your product out there, then check your user conversion metrics.
2. Ask people questions at bus stops and Starbucks. Matt Brezina – Xobni.com
Find market fit by getting out there and asking people what they want. People will tell you what to build. Matt Brezina is very personable and used face-to-face user interactions for Xobni. BTW – Xobni is Inbox spelled backwards.
3. Smoke test. Set up a page with a button that says “Click to pay”. This is how you can measure serious user interest. Dan Martell – FlowTown
Eric Ries started the day with his own story of writing 40,000 lines of code in 6 months. After all of his hard work, no one would click his “download” button. He could have published a page with text and a download button to learn that!
4. Use a Freemium business model. Sean Ellis – DropBox.com
The Freemium business model is a small featured free product with a premium upgrade to all features. Dropbox.com uses this model.
5. The customer is the expert. You are just the note taker.” Cindy Alvarez – KISSmetrics
Stop selling and just listen.
6. “Focus on User Experience (UX) – Users coming to your site is mostly due to pictures and text, not code.” Dave McClure
Thanks to Eric Ries and Sarah Milstein who set up 10 scholarships for the Web 2.0 Expo.
It made my month when I heard I was one of the lucky winners!
Eric Ries, Sarah Milstein, Michelle Waldorf at Web2.0 Expo Lean Startup Intensive May 3, 2010
{ 2 comments }
Common Word Checker powered by Wordnik.com
Today we released a new one page site powered by Wordnik – All the words.
This awesome tool is a Common Word Checker that helps writers choose common words for their blogs, emails and articles. Using a small vocabulary helps young readers, skimmers and non-native English readers grasp meaning more quickly.
The idea for a Common Word Checker came to me years ago when I was employed by a Chicago-based company that worked with Japanese engineers. We wrote simple instructions for the Japanese engineers to avoid miscommunication. One Chicago employee could not figure out how to simplify his writing and frequently used difficult words like “facetious” and “edification”. I rewrote his notes to make it friendlier to non-native English speakers. The Common Word Checker automatically suggests better word choices, thus eliminating rework by others.
This is a great tool for bloggers with a global following. For example, running the Common Word Checker on two widely read blogs, www.whitehouse.gov/blog and www.copyblogger.com, show they rely upon a simple vocabulary.
The Common Word Checker spots seldom used words and suggests more common words. We use the Wordnik API corpus frequency data, related words and examples methods. First the input text is parsed and each word’s corpus frequency is retrieved. Second, if the word’s frequency is below the commonality strictness setting, then synonyms are retrieved. Each synonym with a higher frequency than the word will appear as a suggestion for the user. The examples API method is used to check if a low frequency word is actually a misspelled word.
Thanks to Wordnik for the great API!
{ 0 comments }
One would ask why would we need to create another one paged web sites? For me answer is pretty simple – you can do really professionally only one thing at a time. The same goes to web-sites, if you are short in time you can polish one feature really good and make it really useful, rather than having hundred of features that are not required by users. I’m not intended to say that multi-functional projects are all useless or something, I’m just saying when you don’t have enough time and resources it’s better to get done web-project with really finished one feature. It’s really important today, when Internet is developing fast and every single day for new idea before it hits the market is crucially important.
{ 1 comment }