Marketing
It’s new to you
A lot of straightforward but not-always-obvious wisdom in this 37signals post, “Don’t just try to steal a share of the existing market, create a new one”:
Nintendo goes after people who aren’t using other video game systems. While Xbox 360 and Sony one-up each other trying to reach experienced, demanding gamers, Nintendo goes after newbies. The Wii’s controller makes video games so simple that a three year-old can play it. And the company is thriving because of it…
Nearly half of all undergraduate students in the US now attend community college. Why? They are more affordable, have more lenient admission standards, offer online degrees, and focus on market-driven degrees aimed at nurses, firefighters, law enforcement officers, and EMTs. All that means they are able to enroll students who otherwise might never wind up in a classroom.
You could take this lesson to politics, too — especially local politics, or anywhere you’re trying to outflank an entrenched establishment. Don’t go to the usual power brokers, making the same speech in all of the same places. Put together a coalition of people who don’t usually bump up against each other. And especially, make sure you get all of the people who haven’t been successfully targeted by a political campaign before. Don’t fight the same battles if you can redraw the map.
Come to think of it, I guess that’s how Obama did it. Smart guy.
The Only Blogger With Backup
Caleb Crain (from Steamboats Are Ruining Everything, The New Yorker, etc.) has self-published a collection of his blog posts, titled The Wreck of the Henry Clay:
With all the time and energy you’ve squandered on that blog, you could have written a book. So goes the self-reproach, and indeed, the book in question turns out to be 449 pages long…
All of the posts and essays included in The Wreck of the Henry Clay are available free already on this blog, so why should you buy it? I have no idea! I have given up trying to understand the internet’s economics, but maybe it’ll be like buying ringtones versus stealing MP3s? Who knows. It took a surprising amount of time to turn several hundred blog posts into a several-hundred-page book, so perhaps some of you will be willing to pay me for my PDF-creating skills? As I said, no idea. Let’s not call this “self-published,” by the way. That has a kind of disreputable sound. It’s a chapbook, all right? Why am I doing this? I saw not long ago that someone had published a book of his Twitters, and I felt I was in danger of being behindhand. I am hereby restored to the bleeding edge. Also, now, when the electromagnetic-pulse device is detonated, I will be the only blogger in America with backup. And of course I’m looking forward to kicking back while the cold, hard internet cash at last streams in.
Of course, Snarkmarket, too, has its own experiment in meatspace self-publishing on the way…
Kindle Up Your Textbooks, Children
The Chronicle of Higher Education on the Kindle DX and the market for electronic textbooks:
Most college students
If This Were 1998, This Wouldn’t Be So Hard
Following on Robin’s post about Google Profiles, I’ve re-entered this old debate with myself about whether to create a personal web page. It’d be fun, I’m sure, and maybe even useful, but maybe not.
When I first became aware of the internet, the way to show that you were a savvy web-user was to create your own web page. This was where you stored all of your information that you wanted to share with the world: contact info, work stuff, pictures, writings and ideas, and a smartly curated set of links to other sites.
Now, of course, we’ve scattered all of that information all over the web to sites managed by companies (usually) and devoted to that purpose: Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, and of course, blogs. Academics (which I am) often keep material on their university pages, but those sites usually aren’t suitable for sharing more than a photo, email address and short set of interests.
Strangely, though, that’s become in a way the preferred style for contemporary home pages – a single page that quickly sends you elsewhere, rather than gathering very much together.
My ideal would be to have a site like Bruno Latour’s, but I don’t have his CV with which to pull it off.
So what say you, Snarkmatrix? How many of you have an all-in-one home page? How does it work for you? If you were putting one together now, how would you do it?
Paging Nate Silver
Paul Krugman on “the magazine cover effect”:
[W]hen you see a corporate chieftain on the cover of a glossy magazine, short the stock. Or as I once put it (I