How to Change the World

Lenovo Olympic Bloggers

Check out this site where Lenovo is aggregating the blogs, tweets, pictures, and video of Olympic athletes from around the world. Lenovo provided these athletes with Ideapad laptops and video cameras and let them go at it.

BlogWorld Expo Special Discount

If you're going to BlogWorld Expo, you can get an additional 20% off even the early-bird prices (they expire on August 22nd) by using this special code: "Alltopvip." This conference is in Las Vegas on September 19-21. Click here to register.

Q and A With Darren Rowse

Darren Rowse, Mr. Problogger, gave me a great interview about making money with blogging (or not), Seth Godin's "no-comments" policy, ValleyWag's "ask us permission to comment" policy), blogging tools to use, his personal favorite blogs, Google PageRank, Technorati's future, and the uses of blogs by small businesses. It's a long, eclectic river of blogging commentary. Click here to read it. For more news and information about blogging, please check out Blogging.Alltop.com.

The Impact of Social Media on Sales, Support, Marketing, and Branding

Over at the Sun Microsystems small and medium business site, I published an interview with Josh Bernoff about his new book (co-authored with Charlene Li) called Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies. In this interview he discusses the impact of social media on sales, support, marketing, and branding. He and Charlene are big wheels at Forrester, so this is recommended reading people in any kind of web marketing role. Click here to read the interview to learn about topics such as why the CEO of a publicly-traded company probably can’t write an interesting blog.

How Twitter Made My Website Better

A few weeks ago Chris Brogan published a list of the 100 blog topics that he wished people would cover. One of them was, “How Twitter Improved My Blog,” and I accepted the challenge to write something along these lines. (For those of you who are unfamiliar with Twitter, you can read “The Tao of Twitter,” “Newbies Guide to Twitter,” or “Ode to Twitter.”) Here is my answer to Chris’s request.

1. Twitter made my website faster. One day someone on Twitter complained that Truemors took a long time to load. Out of the twittersphere popped Jason Grigsby, and he analyzed how we could make Truemors faster. Without Twitter, Jason and I would have never connected. It must have taken him hours of research and years of accumulated experience to do this for me. How cool is that?

2. Twitter made my website more interesting. One day Laura Fitton (she is 50% of the reason I joined Twitter) sent me an email because she read a tweet from David Armano just after he witnessed teenagers pulling out an old woman from her stalled car. Unfortunately, the car had stalled on a railroad track in Glenview, Illinois, and they got her out just in time to save her life. Without Twitter I would have not gotten to know Laura, and Laura would have not gotten to know David, and Truemors not have beaten the news wires by several hours with this story.

3. Twitter continues to make my website more interesting. I get several stories each day from the forty people that I follow on Twitter. Also, I follow the New York Times, BBC, and International Herald Tribune Twitter feeds for more story ideas. I know I can get RSS feeds from these publications in my feedreader (NetNewsWire) but watching their tweets is more exciting and efficient. For example, the lag in RSS feeds is about thirty minutes, and at any given time, I have 1,000 unread stories to scan in NetNewsWire.

4. Twitter increased traffic. Jim Long is a cameraman for NBC. He flys around the world on Air Force One covering whatever the president does. One day he tweeted that he saw Zac Efron and Vanessa Hudgens of High School Musical 2 eating and smooching in Cafe Sydney in Australia while George W. was at APEC/OPEC. Someone picked up this tweet and truemored it, and this brought Truemors tens of thousands of page views. By the way, if you think insipid celebrity sightings doesn’t create traffic, you’re very wrong.

5. Twitter continues to increase traffic. Now I use Twitterfeed to automatically post the “Science” and “Odd” truemors to Twitter every six hours. Michelle Wolverton, who I met via Laura Fitton, has helped me as a virtual assistant on the project. On any given day, Twitter is the third best source of click throughs—trailing only Google and Popurls. Admittedly, some people have complained that I use Twitter to pimp Truemors too much, but my mother always told me that if you’re not irritating some people, you’re not doing anything interesting.

6. Twitter made my web site more true and less rumor. Jim Long helped debunk the truemor of the “mystery airplane” that was flying around Washington D. C. on 9/11. Here’s the commment that he posted:

   OK everybody, move along…nothing to see here. LOL. There’s really nothing mysterious about this aircraft. It’s the Air Force E4-B. A cold war relic, it was essentially designed as a flying command post for the President and SECDEF in times of nuclear crisis. I’ve circled the globe in this aircraft a number of times.

7. Twitter enabled me to make new friends. This is the greatest benefit of all. It connected me to people like Greg, Laura, Jim, Michelle, and Chris that I had not known. They have helped me in many ways, but more importantly, they have become friends, and friends are far more important than page views.

8. Twitter enabled me to re-connect to old friends. This includes Dave Winer (who is the other 50% of why I joined Twitter) and not-so-old friends like Robert Scoble and Hugh Macleod. In particular, Hugh is an interesting case because I had been trying to get in email touch with him for months because my emails to him went straight to his spam folder. With Twitter’s direct messages, I was finally able to reconnect with him. There is something truly elegant about 140-character emails—if only all email were limited to 140 characters.



9. Twitter enabled me to preserve my heritage. This is the best story of all. One day on Twitter Scott Yoshinaga asked me if “Duke Kawasaki” is my father. I tell him that he is. He tells me this story: He and his fiancee, Audra Furuichi, bought a book called Japan: Islands of the Rising Sun at a Friends of the Library of Hawaii used-book sale in Honolulu at McKinley High School. Inside the book was a copy of my father’s certificate of election to the state senate of Hawaii. Apparently this was my father’s book—he was a voracious reader and imparted a love of books to me. And my father graduated from McKinley to top it all off.

   Maybe this doesn’t make my site better, but it makes me happy. Scott is sending the certificate to me, and this piece of my family’s history would have been lost were it not for Twitter. Be sure to check out Scott’s and Audra’s cool manga web-comics at nemu*nemu (Japanese for “to sleep”). And they were kind enough to make a manga comic about me and Twitter!

All in all, Twitter is very useful and a lot of fun. From the outside looking in, it may not appear to be either to many folks, but some things need to be believed to be seen.

Life Remix

I came across a very interesting blog called Life Remix. Actually, the site represents a bunch of bloggers who have banded together to make “enrich people’s lives.”

Here’s an example of the type of articles you’ll find there:

1. How to Work Like the Masters

2. Even Simple Multi-tasking Can Make a Project 30% Late

3. Things Your IT Guy Wants you to Know

4. Why I started keeping a daily “one-sentence journal” (ok, a not-quite daily journal).

5. How Does a Bestseller Happen? A Case Study in Hitting #1 on the New York Times

Do check the site out. It’s a rich vein of gold within the mountain of dirt called the blogosphere.

How to Make a "Comic" Blog

Many people have asked me how I made the trip to Québec blog entry, so here’s an explanation. I used three products:

1. iPhoto

2. Comic Life

3. Skitch

I don’t think one can use this style of blogging too often, but it is effective and fun for “special occasions.” All three products, by the way, are Macintosh-only right now.

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Job-a-matic From SimplyHired

I swear I saw something about this already in this blog, but I can't seem to find it. :-)

SimplyHired is announcing a service called “Job-a-matic.” This enables bloggers to easily (ie, adding a snippet of HTML) to their blogs in order to host a jobs board. You can see mine in the sidebar to the right.

In my case, a limited number of jobs appear in the sidebar. People can see all the jobs that employers have placed in my blog by clicking here. Employers can place a job listing by clicking here.

SimplyHired handles these additional pages as well as billing and collecting. Basically, a blogger’s job is to draw the kind of traffic that would attract companies to place ads. It’s another way to monetize a blog.

For more info about Job-a-matic, click here. Garage is an investor in SimplyHired.

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The Short Tale: Much Ado About Not Much

Talk about unintended consequences, all I wanted to do with “A Review of My First Year of Blogging” was provide some factoids about my blog. However, this tidbit became quite the topic:

Total advertising revenue: approximately $3,350 = $1.39 cpm. (This assumes that I can get Google to pay me. I’ve tried several times during the year to get my snail mail PIN so that I can get paid, but I’ve never received it. I don’t mind Google getting the float...)

Things started to heat up because of Chris Anderson’s entry called “Don’t Quit Your Day Job.” Various reactions followed:

1. AdSense sucks for bloggers.

2. Nobody can make money blogging.

3. Guy’s clueless about AdSense and advertising.

4. What link bait! Guy is so sly... (I wish I was this clever.)

So here’s more info about my advertising revenue and this whole drama:

1. “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.” This was one factoid in a list of ten. It wasn’t the focus of the posting. Certainly my intent was not to get sympathy, position myself as clueless, impugn AdSense, or find advertisers—all of which happened! Several kind people even offered me great advice about how to increase revenue—the blogosphere never ceases to amaze me.

2. The $3,350 is for all the revenue I got for the year (actually, the total is now about $4,000 because I found some checks) from all sources: AdSense, BlogAds, Federated Media, and Feedburner. I used AdSense for only a couple of months when I just started.

3. I don’t take advertising revenue very seriously. It’s one way to keep score in blogging (Technorati is another), and I’m all for making as much as I can (to pay for my hockey), but it’s not the reason I blog.

4. In case you’re interested, the reasons that I blog are:

   • To increase the likelihood that “two guys/gals in garage” with “the next Google” will come to Garage for funding.

   • To help companies and people that I (a) like, (b) have sometimes invested in, (c) am sometimes advising publicize their products and services. This is also known as “alignment of interest” as opposed to “conflict of interest.”

   • To be able to tell Web 2.0 entrepreneurs how full of shiitake they are if they think that advertising is a slam-dunk business model. Essentially, a Web 2.0 company would have to be 10,000 times better at selling advertising than me before it gets interesting.

   • To test ideas with “reality checks.” How many guys have 30,000-person focus groups?

   • To tap the “wisdom of the crowd.” For example, ideas for my next book. How many guys have 30,000 people providing new-product ideas?

   • To make meaning and fulfill my mantra of “empowering people.”

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A Review of My First Year of Blogging

1. 2,436,117 page views for an average of approximately 6,200/day.

2. 262 posts generated 6,961 comments and 1,937 trackbacks. That’s 25 comments/post and 7 trackbacks/post.

3. 21,000 people receive RSS feeds via Feedburner and 1,457 receive emails via FeedBlitz.

4. Total advertising revenue: approximately $3,350 = $1.39 cpm. (This assumes that I can get Google to pay me. I’ve tried several times during the year to get my snail mail PIN so that I can get paid, but I’ve never received it. I don’t mind Google getting the float...)

   Update: the product manager of Adsense, Rob Kniaz, read this in my blog and got my account squared away. This happened in approximately fourteen hours from the time I first posted mentioned the problem on a national holiday. Life is good...

5. Most linked-to posting (953): The 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint.

6. Can’t-understand-why-more people-(11)-haven’t-linked-to posting: Ten Questions With Aziza Mohmmand. What a shame because this is the purest story of entrepreneurship that I covered.

7. Ending Technorati ranking: #45. Highest ranking during the year: #35 or so. One interpretation of this self-judged lack of success is that the blogosphere prefers news and gossip to essays although my buddy Seth Godin disproves this theory.

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8. Primary blogging tools: MarsEdit (Dear Ranchero hands, MarsEdit needs the ability to schedule postings), ImageScale, and iStockphoto.

9. Most disappointing realization: After a week, most postings are “gone.” Perhaps people’s expectations of blogs are so low that they don’t consider them reference sources. Hence, I have to write another book. My challenge is that I have three tasks: answering email, blogging, and writing a book, and I can only do two. :-)

10. Speaking of books: my request for ideas generated approximately 125 suggestions. Thanks, guys! I’m leaning towards writing a book called How to Change the World: A Practical Book for Impractical People. I just have to figure out how to make it a curve-jump ahead of, as opposed to repackaging of, The Art of the Start. If you’d like to help, please click here for a wiki for this idea. The password is “kickbutt.”

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