Social Surplus

I just read this incredible article about social surplus and it's quite inspirational.

Here's a quick excerpt:

Let's say that everything stays 99 percent the same, that people watch 99 percent as much television as they used to, but 1 percent of that is carved out for producing and for sharing. The Internet-connected population watches roughly a trillion hours of TV a year. That's about five times the size of the annual U.S. consumption. One per cent of that is 100 Wikipedia projects per year worth of participation.

I think that's going to be a big deal. Don't you?

If you've got a little bit of time on your hands go read the article for yourself and get just a little bit excited.

Audit Page Tracking Code

This is just a quick reminder to audit your pages for tracking code from time to time. I just realized that the blog wasn't being tracked! This is not a big deal for me, however on a typical B2C website the more complete your statistics the better you can make strategic marketing decisions.

Not that it matters, but back to PR6

Not that it matters, but it appears that the mastermynde.com website is back to a PageRank of 6. And oddly, many other pages that have been on the site for a long time are now unranked. This highlights that PageRank is not the only thing to concern yourself with when looking for link partners.

Osmo Wiio

This article at 37signals.com very much resonates for me. It is an entertaining summary of Osmo Wiio's theories about human communication.

How often have you felt that the following could apply to your communication?

"If a message can be understood in different ways, it will be understood in just that way which does the most harm."

Go read the article now, it's worth it.

Clients Blogging?

My friend and client Alex Curylo makes an interesting point, which is that many many many blogs fly under the radar and have few if any cross references on the web. I'm sure this is partially due to few people understanding how to properly promote themselves, others not caring, and of course general Signal-to-noise ratios.

I'm inspired to start posting again, thanks Alex!

What do I do?

I look at a lot of websites.

I do web marketing for my clients and I've personally done cross-linking research for dozens of clients. This is how many websites I have looked at (solely doing this work!) expressed as a math equation:
(for the sake of the equation let's express dozens as 36)

36 clients X (10 to 30 key phrases) X 30 top ranking sites = 10,800 to 32,400

That is a lot of websites.

Here is an explanation about my query in the title of this post...

I have recently looked at my website again while discussing services offerings with a copywriter, and I have come to the realization that my website does very little to tell people what I do. I have a single page that has four topics, each with approximately 100-200 words. Compared to hundreds of my competitors I definitely fall on the lean side of explaining my business.

The odd thing is that I get inquiries from potential clients all the time. The bulk of my clients are referrals, but over time the number of unsolicited inquiries I get is starting to grow and I'm busy enough that I've had to turn work away fairly consistently.

I haven't drawn any particular conclusions from this, but it was intriguing enough that I wanted to write about it.

If you want to see exactly what I'm talking about look at my regular site now - despite my observations above I've decided to add some more detail and depth to my site within the next week or two - what's the worst that can happen? :)

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I'm hiring in the Comox Valley

I'm looking for a junior web person - if that is you or someone you know, get in touch. See the linky-link for more details.