Archive for January, 2012

“Whole Foods Bans Children” – Why Wording Matters in Marketing

Are we all familiar with the kids-free movement?  I guess it’s a movement now, although almost all of the people I see talking about it seem to be opposed, which makes me think it’s mostly a straw man.  But if we grant its existence it’s a movement all about banning kids from privately-owned public spaces like shops and restaurants. Controversial, no?

There’s a lot you can say about this idea.  It’s a blessing for those of us that don’t have kids, or that have ‘em but left ‘em at home to get a moment of peace and quiet.  On the other hand there’s no group with more time on their hands and eagerness to complain on the internet than stay-at-home parents.

Image from, of course, the venerable XKCD

So you could color me a bit surprised by a Missouri Whole Foods’s name for their in-house daycare hours:  “child-free shopping hours.”

Whoops.

You can sort of see where they’re coming from.  “Child-free shopping,” as in for you the parent who might enjoy doing your shopping without having to keep an eye on your child.  Drop ‘em at the free day-care area in the store and shop both responsibility- and guilt-free.  Nice, right?

I suspect this is an idea that might have actually had legs.  Certainly it seems worth trying.  But when you Google it all you will find is a series of blogs and local news articles talking about those damnable kid-banners and citing the Whole Foods “child-free shopping hours” as one of the primary examples.

(Some of the better articles, it should be said, do include a statement from a Whole Foods spokesperson re-emphasizing that their program is not a ban on kids in the store or in any way related to similar attempts.  But many do not, because really, who has time to check the story when our kids are at stake?!)

And so we’re back to our very favorite MA101 lesson of all:  word choice, word choice, word choice.  Think about all the different ways your words can be read, not just the way you mean them.

“Child-free” does certainly mean “a relaxed state that parents can enjoy for a bit because of our free day-care!”  It also apparently means “we don’t allow kids because they irritate other customers.”  And with institutions using them both ways, it’s probably one that kid-friendly establishments (like poor Whole Foods) should steer clear of.

Any questions?  Leave a comment.  But throw the kid out of the computer room and lock the door first, please; MA101 is going children-free.

2012
01/17
CATEGORY
Media & Internet
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A “Putting That Library Science Degree to Work” Puzzle

What was that Bond movie after Casino Royale?  Don’t lie, you had to Google it too.  What a piece of crap.

But there’s a scene from it that I’ll always remember.  Bond (in his most chiseled incarnation yet) is asking for information on someone over the phone, and the wonks back at MI6 have a computer dutifully crunching all his searches.  Because he’s a Brit and talks funny he says something along the lines of “blah blah blah Mr. Green, that’s G – R – double-E – N.”  And up on screen the computer goes “G – R- W – BACKSPACE – E – E – N.”

It wasn't in this scene. But no one screencaps the nerdy scenes, so here's Daniel Craig looking rugged instead.

The “G – R- E – E – N moment” is easy to overlook and irrelevant to the plot of the movie (insofar as there is one).  But still a moment that will stick with me, because that’s how computers think.  They’re working on the very best data available to them, moment to moment, and the problem has progressed beyond GIGO (“Garbage In, Garbage Out”) — it’s now a problem of having good stuff at both ends of the equation, but a crappy system for turning your good info into the computer’s good info.  You say “double,” it goes “W,” and it takes a second to correct.

Why do I bring this up?  Personal experience, as usual, and a puzzle out there for all the search engine wonks reading this blog.

The problem is Go.

This Go. The board game.

Let’s say you wanted to play Go.  More specifically you wanted to play it on, say, a portable device — an iPhone or a tablet or the like.  And you particularly wanted to be able to play in “versus” mode, against another player, long-distance.

What do you search for?

Because “go” is right out.  If you go to your app store of choice and search for the term “go” you get a few hits for the board game and about a hundred thousand hits for “GoBirds!” and “Go Dog Go ReadAloud” and any number of other things with those two letters somewhere in either the game title or the description keywords.

Since I obviously didn’t pull this puzzle out of thin air, I’ve chewed on it a bit and bushwhacked my way around to some solutions, or at least to some more manageable triage.  But I’m curious to see how my readers do.

And if you’re really clever and figure it out, maybe we should play some Go.  Let me know what you come up with!

2012
01/16
CATEGORY
Personal Life
Thoughts & Musings
5 comments

The One Sure-Fire Way to Increase Blog Traffic

I’ve been writing MA101 for a bit over two years now (the anniversary comes during the holiday season, and so tends to go overlooked), and in that time I’ve seen (and occasionally given) a lot of advice about blog traffic.  It seems to be what everyone’s interested in — traffic, traffic, traffic.

Which is fine if the purpose of your blog is to sell ad space, or to direct some of that traffic to a for-profit endeavor, or something like that.  It’s less useful for MA101, which exists almost entirely so that you find something entertaining when you Google my name (rather than, say, job sites still listing me as a “game designer” because I wrote a couple articles for a very nerdy gaming magazine back in high school).

Still there, a few pages down in Google.

But regardless, I from time to time dispense advice, some of it sincere and some of it rather facetious.  (I’m actually a bit worried about how many sincere-sounding comments the facetious one is drawing).  Today’s is sincere:

Stop worrying about SEO and churn and page “stickiness” and so on for a moment.  If you write decent stuff and put it out on a regular schedule, your traffic is going to increase, and it’s going to increase because of one simple factor that you can control:

Time.

How long you stick with it.  Patience, perseverance , and getting your content up on a reliable, regular basis.  Here’s the site traffic for MA101 from its first six months of existence:

And here’s the last six month’s (through Dec. 2011).  I left the numerals out so that I wouldn’t be bragging/embarrass myself (depending on your own relative traffic, obviously), but everything’s to scale, and it’s mostly the curve I want you looking at.

No, I didn’t draw the curve in.  The WordPress stats page isn’t that sophisticated, and I don’t love you enough to copy the data manually into Excel.  Use your imaginations.

The first six months are mostly flat with a bit of a bump toward the end.  The last six months (in addition to being much, much higher in general) curve pretty steadily upward.

That’s how it goes.  You plod along for a while, with friends and family coming by to check out your new project.  Google eventually sends someone who likes the content your way.  They keep reading, maybe eventually they link to it or refer it to a friend.  That friend passes it on to another friend, and on and on until suddenly the curve starts sweeping upward.

Can you try and hasten the process?  Yes.  There are things that will work well, things that will work but make your blog look a little odd because you’ve crammed it with keywords or social-networking gimmicks, and things that flat out don’t work.

But whether you do those things or not you’re going to see this change eventually.  The only real traffic-boosting secret is time.

I’ll leave the comments section open for anyone who has their own experiences with blog traffic and what they have (or haven’t) done to increase it — stop by and tell me about your curves, won’t you?

2012
01/13
CATEGORY
Personal Life
Writing Life
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Asopjmlkjefjgea i knff

Oh, man, this is too good.

So remember that time I got an iPhone so I’d finally have all my to-do lists, random notes, and all that other stuff in one place?

And remember when I dicked around with it playing “Words with Friends” for like two weeks before actually moving any of that info to the phone?

And then I finally did synch it all up and get my list of blog-posts-to-be all queued up, with a bunch written and ready to post?

And then, and then remember when I forgot that I still have to hit “Upload” and not “Save as Draft” like a freaking idiot?

Yeah, those were some good times.

So my lesson for the day, as I dash out the door to work — technology can solve a lot of problems for you, but they’re rarely the problems you actually needed fixed.

Anyone else ever tried to automate and wound up further behind than before?  Please share; it will make me feel much better about myself.  Work now!

P.S. — if you’re into the “Words with Friends” thing, let me know.  I can always use another game or two going on.

2012
01/12
CATEGORY
Personal Life
Writing Life
2 comments

Abraham Lincoln, Spokesman for the Get Rich Quick Scam?

This one cries our for explanation, so up on the blog it goes.  You know those sidebar ads that a lot of websites have nowadays, with crazy “exclusive videos” that will teach you the secret to cheap insurance, penny stock fortunes, prehensile genitalia, or just about anything else impossible-sounding?  They’re pretty much everywhere these days, and they all look roughly the same:

Okay, all well and good.  I’m sure there are people out there who do click on these.  Far be it from me, a penniless freelancer, to criticize marketing techniques, even really cheesy ones.

But what the hell is Abe Lincoln doing up there?

Ol’ Abe has a lot of cultural cache, some of it legitimately earned and some not, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen him as iconic of wealth before.  If anything, people work to stress the “poor rail-splitter” thing while downplaying the “successful lawyer” thing.  Everybody does hate lawyers, after all.

So I guess this is just because his face is on money?  And we went with the $5 bill because the sort of desperate sod who might actually click through a link like this has clearly never seen a larger denomination in his life, and therefore wouldn’t recognize a Grant or a Benjamin?

I feel like I can look at most ads and say “I see what you did there,” but the Abe Lincoln/overnight wealth connection just escapes me.  Any help?

2012
01/11
CATEGORY
Media & Internet
6 comments

Following the World’s Oldest Profession

There’s just no modest way to say this, I’m afraid, but honestly — I get propositioned a lot.  Sexually, I mean.  It’s just an offer I get almost every day.  I can’t help it.

I mean, I do use the internet.

This new follower popped up on my Twitter account last night.  I don’t recommend clicking on the link (it’s an image so you can’t anyway, actually, but don’t copy it out either — studiously avoiding all tasteless humor, I can safely say that you’re likely to catch something off of her).

But there’s a beautiful historical echo in there that I had to share with you all.  Twitter may have changed the world, but the world’s oldest profession has taken to it entirely unchanged.  Greek prostitutes B.C.E. sometimes wore sandals with a specific message stamped on the sole where it would leave an imprint in the dirt: AKOLOUTHI.

“Follow me.”

The more things change, the more they remain the same.

So — anyone else gotten a good proposition lately?  Er…you know what I mean.

2012
01/10
CATEGORY
Media & Internet
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System of the World

It’s the time of year for self-improvement, and contrary sort that I am I’ve been under-preforming by even my low standards.

So late this evening/early this morning, as I was wallowing about in a hungover daze unable to sleep and deeply dreading my next poo, I got out of my under-appreciated bed, put on my best writerly duds (more on that later this week, I think), and decided that I was going to Straighten My Life Out.  Shortly thereafter, the kitchen caught fire.

Okay — I exaggerated.  Some loose leaf tea got spilled under a burner, unnoticed, and it went up in smoke as the coils heated.  Not a life-altering disaster.  But enough to set the cat howling and to teach me that the smoke alarm, even unsafely and possibly illegally removed from its mounting, still carries enough battery charge to beep incessantly at 4 AM.

Fucker.

It’s sort of hard not to interpret something like that (ha! reading the tea leaves…) as a sign to leave well enough alone and go back to the old messy ways.  Aiding the temptation, the plethora of iPhone “organize your life” sorts of apps is so vast that picking one, learning its ins and outs, and getting all my various good intentions properly loaded into it is a massive To-Do list item just in and of itself.  Not inspiring.

But on the bright side I have a newly lowered standard for self-improvement achievements:  a day where I don’t set the stove on fire is a day where I’m making real progress toward better Geoffreyhood.

A standard we can all achieve?  Or has anyone had a self-improvement kick start out even worse?  Drop a comment and share your thoughts!

AFTERNOON UPDATE:  Managed to pour hot ham and bean soup all over my desk, chair, and carpet while eating lunch at the computer.  The success story rolls on.

2012
01/09
CATEGORY
Personal Life
2 comments

A Crazy Santorum/Google/Keyword-Based Advertising Theory

Ok readers.  I need your help.  I am not a regular Daily Show watcher, but I know some of you are.  So quick, someone tell me — when did KY start running advertisements on the webcast?

This is more important than it might sound to you at first.

Because the world of internet advertising is always a bit of a murky one.  It’s not like television, where you can figure out who paid the most for their ad slots based on show times.  Money’s clearly changing hands somewhere, but there also seem to be bizarre, keyword-based tie-ins, so that occasionally you wind up with an ExxonMobil spot directly before an episode of The Rachel Maddow Show that talks about oil subsidies and references Exxon by name.

Hence my question about The Daily Show.  Because I don’t watch it regularly, but did pull up a clip from Facebook yesterday.  And the clip used Rick Santorum’s name liberally.  And the advertisement before the clip was for KY jelly.

We see where we’re going with this, yes?

If you don’t it’s because you’re not familiar with Rick Santorum‘s little Google problem.

To make a long story short, he said some things about gay people that were not very respectful.  So a particular gay man with a particularly large online following decided to use the power of Google to redefine Rick Santorum‘s name as a word, and that word (as you can see if you click through) does have a certain relationship to personal lubricant.

So.

If you’ve connected all the dots with me here, you can see why it would be totally awesome if some keyword-based engine in a dusty old server farm somewhere chugged through the Daily Show transcripts before air-time, saw the word “Santorum” used a bunch of times, and concluded that viewers would be interested in personal lubricant products.

Because the terms are related, ya know?

I would be fascinated to hear from anyone who can lend credence to or (less exciting but still helpful) disprove this delightful theory.  Got an in on web-based TV advertising and how it’s scheduled?  Seen lube ads on The Daily Show long before Rick Santorum‘s sudden surge from behind?

Yes, I did that on purpose.  But leave a comment anyway, if you can help us shine some light into this dark and mysterious cavern of…yeah, okay, I’ll stop now.

…Santorum!

Hee hee hee.

2012
01/06
CATEGORY
Media & Internet
3 comments

YouTube’s Mild Vices

One of the things you learn early on working as a writer is that most people who employ writers don’t actually value the written word very highly.  If they did, they’d have learned to use it themselves.

So “writers” quickly end up being jack-of-all-contents as well — find me the freelancer who doesn’t know a bit of HTML or some tricks with video editing software and I’ll find you a very hungry writer.  Google my name and you’ll still find YouTube videos, hand-filmed-and-edited, from when I was theoretically working as a copy editor and fact-checker.  All trades, like I say.

I bring this up because I keep learning more and more about YouTube in the course of my work for various employers.  There’s a whole world of little fiddly bits hidden behind the control panel, if you actually run your own YouTube channel, and some of them are just plain fascinating.

These are “YouTube Rating” options.  They affect certain searches, mostly ones by the half-dozen people out there who still list themselves as minors in their user info (most of whom are pedophiles role-playing the other side of the relationship anyway).

But they are there, and setting them specifically rather than leaving the “No Rating” default up can, theoretically, give you a tiny bump in the numbers.  So serious SEO-driven types do make sure their videos get “rated.”

All well and good.  But…”strong language” as opposed to “explicit language”?  That just makes me think the one is more British than the other:  “Oh, I say chap!  Roger her, roger her good and proper!”  Strong language.  Rather strong, rather strong!  Pip pip.

And “mild drug use” versus “drug use”?  Is that like “a little bit pregnant”?  One rating for firing up a single doobie and the other for breaking out the bong, I guess.

Given that half the “trending” or “popular” videos on YouTube at any given moment are porn anyway, I’m a little underwhelmed by their “light, medium, heavy” sort of content rating system.  But at least it’s there.  For the children.

Right?

2012
01/05
CATEGORY
Media & Internet
1 comment

X-Men v. the United States, “What is Human?” – The Verdict at Last

Sadly the court case wasn’t actually called X-Men v. the United States of America.  It went by the much drearier name of Toy Biz, Inc. v. United States in the United States Court of International Trade.  But it did define whether mutants were human or not.

And yes, you have heard that storyline before, in various Marvel Comics publications.

Radiolab had the story — you can still listen to it at their website if you want to.  The short of it is that U.S. customs slap an extra 12% tariff onto “dolls,” but only a little over 6% onto “toys.”  The difference between dolls and toys?  Dolls are any products that visually represent humans; toys are anything that doesn’t look human (monsters, angels, aliens, etc.).

Enter a pair of creative lawyers, Sherry Singer and Indie Singh, who realized that Marvel Toys (Toy Biz Inc., at the time of the case) could save an awful lot of money if they stopped importing action figures as “dolls” and started importing them as “toys” instead.  They went to court with the argument that the X-Men, being super-powered mutants, were not human and therefore action figures of them did not visually represent humans.

Now if you’re not a big comics fan, the important part of the story is this:  most of the characters in this dispute are “mutants” in Marvel’s world, human beings born with altered genes that give you superpowers.  And a whole lot of the X-Men comics are about mutants and non-mutants trying to define — legally, philosophically, and occasionally just taxinomically — whether the characters are human or not.

This often winds up with a dystopian flavor to it.  Marvel mutants spend a lot of time fighting to avoid being rounded up and put into camps, hunted down by giant government-sponsored killer robots, etc.

Pure fantasy, of course. A real government-sponsored killer robot would have an American flag on one bicep and the Boeing logo on the other.

So it’s sort of refreshing to see the U.S. attorneys fighting hard to keep the X-Men legally declared “human,” even if it is just to avoid losing tariff revenue.

The outcome of the case?  Oh yes.  You can read the full summary if you want, but the U. S. Court of International Trade ruled that the X-Men are not human, and may be imported as “toys.”

This raises some interesting questions for importers of other action figures, to say nothing of the rest of the Marvel line:

  • Since Marvel can import all its characters as non-human now, but some of the action figures are in fact entirely human characters (such as Tony Stark, better known to the world as Iron Man, a genetically-normal human in a powered armor suit), how long until the government appeals the decision on the basis of “Your Honor, clearly the plaintiffs don’t know shit about comics”?
  • Marvel being a subsidiary of Disney, can we expect to see the same case made soon for, say, the Disney Fairies line, on account of Tinkerbell being even more firmly non-human than Wolverine?
  • What about gods (like, say, Thor)?  On the one hand, clearly non-human.  On the other hand, made in God’s own image, am I right?
  • Wasn’t there an American Girl doll that was a freed slave?  If the doll represents her in her time as a slave, does it count as non-human, or at least only get charged 3/5 of the tariff?

I’m no legal expert, but I do know a thing or two about comic book nerds, and my prediction — just throwing it out here — is that the U. S. Court of International Trade just opened up a whole worm-can of precedent.

Got a money-saving argument of your own based on this new ruling?  Drop a comment.  Better yet, sell your idea to a law firm and then drop a comment.  But I won’t steal if you do share it here first, I promise.

2012
01/04
CATEGORY
Humor
Thoughts & Musings
2 comments

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