12 F – in the exit row, no seat in front of it, enough room for Manute Bol to stretch out and I snagged it this morning. Such small victories make all the difference. You have to make eye contact with the nice steward and say “yes” when they ask if you are man enough to be the first out of the plane (I never want to be punching out some old lady in the rush to evacuate), but talk about easy living …..
I’ve redirected my feeds through Feedburner and tagged the site with a Sitemeter tracker.
Research Triangle Tuesday through Friday
Cotuit on Saturday and part of Sunday
Basingstoke, UK Monday and Tuesday – 25 & 26.
Tokyo 26-29
Cotuit 30th – October 2nd
NYC -Oct 3-5
“Gunkholing” is the act of exploring the heads of harbors and bays in a small boat, poking one’s bow into the nether regions of an estuary, following channels and streams through salt marshes and shallow water into the “gunk.”
Saturday was the perfect day for such explorations, so with Cousin Pete at the helm, my wife, son and I shot out from Cotuit over glassy waters across Vineyard Sound to Menemsha, a little fishing village on the southwestern corner of Martha’s Vineyard. We ran down the Tisbury coast, running along the glacial scree-strewn shoreline of sand cliffs and slight hills, dotted with cottages and summer homes that must enjoy one of the best views in all of New England.
At Menemsha we were greeted by a crowd of anglers standing on the breakwaters. The annual Martha’s Vineyard Striped Bass and Bluefish Derby opened last week and the competition brings out the maniacal side in all Vineyard fishermen. We motored inside, past the red-roofed Coast Guard station and over the bar into Menemsha Pond, crossing over Carribbean-clear water and fields of submerged eel grass. We gunkholed up inside of Nashaquitsa Pond until we ran out of water at the highway bridge.
Ashore we ate a lobster roll and stuffed quahog at Larson’s Fish Market, close by where Steven Spielberg built Quint’s boathouse for Jaws. The hulk of Quint’s boat, the Orca, allegedly lies rotting on the Lobsterville Beach shore.
After poking around the village we reboarded and headed back north along the Tisbury coast, stopping to explore Lake Tashmoo on the northshore of the Vineyard. At the very head of the Lake we found a beautiful abandoned factory overlooking a millpond and I’m still trying to figure out what it was for. We netted some bait (baby menhaden) and tried our luck for fluke (summer flounder) on the rips at Middle Ground, Hedge Fence, and finally, with success, at Succonnesset.
All in all a perfect day.
I’ve never been so crass as to blog about this blog’s Technorati rank, nor do I obsess about what my server logs are telling me or Google Analytics for that matter. To be frank, there’s a lot of things I could be doing better to build audience, or at least track what audience I have, but since this is a personal affair designed to cure my ongoing case of cacoethes scribendi (yes, I studied Latin), I haven’t focused on audience development.
I do have a corporate blogging project under management, and that does deserve some serious audience development. It softlaunched back in the late spring, with utterly no fanfare, as I wanted to let it simmer for a while and get the bloggers contributing to it comfortable with the ineffable customs of Blogistan before really seeking some traffic. This post is an attempt to come to terms with what constitutes blog “success” and then share some of the tricks I’ve picked up from reading the masters and from messing around with blogs since 2002 when I launched my first one on Blogger.
While a personal blogger — which I am under this umbrella — may not give a rat’s ass about traffic, it’s still nice to know that you aren’t talking to yourself like a psychotic in the median strip of Park Avenue shouting at skyscrapers with a Bible in hand. So what are the indications of life on a blog? How does one declare success on a corporate or commercial blog? After the jump I get into it. Continue reading “Blog marketing and measurement”
It took me an hour to clear the spam out of the comments this morning, perhaps because there were over 2,000 pieces of bounced spam in my churbuck.com inbox. I need to do something about the spammer who have hijacked my domain and are forging churbuck.com return addresses onto their crap. My ISP isn’t a lot of help.
I generally nuke about 200 spam comments from this blog every morning — mostly Asian thanks to tendency to blog about China every now and again. (Do not blog any Chinese characters unless you really really want to pick up a flood of double-byte character spam.)
Then my spam filter, Messagefire, crapped out, telling me it was nailed by disk quota issues, so I had to clear out 750 pieces of suspected spam over there — Messagefire is a good service, but it doesn’t deal with the flood of bounces that come from the spam attacks on my domain.
Grumpy.
Lenovo Ranked No. 1 for Notebook Customer Satisfaction | The Business Edition
Normally I don’t honk my Lenovo horn on this blog, but TBR issued its customer satisfaction report yesterday and I was especially gratified to see this:
“Lenovo’s customer complaint management was identified as a strong differentiator for its proactive approach to remediate customers’ technology-related concerns.”
Our customer satisfaction teams and service crews have embraced the proactive blog support concept wholeheartedly and the proof is in accolades like this one.
row2k News: Ernestine Bayer, 97, Mother of Women’s Rowing in United States dies in New Hampshire
I spoke with Ernestine Bayer while researching The Book of Rowing. The amazing success story that is women’s rowing is due to her tenacious support and advocacy of the sport. She will be missed.
“Mrs. Bayer was a world leader in introducing women to the sport of rowing. Through her efforts, women’s rowing was added to the summer Olympic schedule. During her life time she earned every award given by the national rowing association: Nominee for the Sullivan Award from rowing, member of the first Women’s rowing Olympic Committee, member of the National Rowing Foundation (NRF) Rowing Hall of Fame, First United States Gold rowing medal, Carlin Award, Coach of the Year, and named one of rowing’s 10 most influential people of the century. She to this day holds the world record on the rowing ergometer for women 90 .”
Edge Perspectives with John Hagel: Mastering New Marketing Practices
I’m a Hagel fan. This is from a great post on the “new” marketing.
“* Attract – create incentives for people to seek you out.
* Assist – the most powerful way to attract people is to be as helpful and engaging with them as possible – this requires a deep understanding of the various contexts in which people might use your products and a willingness to “co-create” products with customers.
* Affiliate – mobilize third parties, including other customers, to become even more helpful to the people you interact with.”