garry’s subposterous

We nanotargeted more than 125 niche groups, with more than 1,000 pieces of creative, for less than $100,000. On Google alone, an acquisition budget of less than $20,000 got us more than 20,000 clicks, 5,500 active e-mail sign- ups, and more than 2,500 donors. We were able to reach persuasion niches (this is akin to someone opening up and reading a mail piece) for a fraction of a penny per impression, and less than 50 cents per interaction.

They targeted geographic and demographic niches online.  They tested messages to see what worked best.  Here's an example:

In real terms, Minnesotans who were searching for cheap gas or researching fuel-efficient cars saw ads about Franken’s plan to lower gas prices.

They worked on every conceivable niche group with online ads tracking what worked and what didn't.  What ads convinced viewers to click on them and view the message from the campaign.  What messages from the campaign convinced viewers to donate and/or volunteer.

So the long tail is real and so are online ads? Neat.

Matt Cutts, a software engineer and an eloquent corporate spokesman for Google, spoke at PubCon earlier this month and later gave a video interview to Web Pro News, in which he said that the speed at which web pages are available might become a factor in SEO moving into 2010. He said that because many within Google consider fastness to be vital to the web, the company is considering making web site speed a factor in calculating page rankings.

Wow, this would be brilliant. It would also give a lot of engineers reason to get paid more to make sure the site works fast.

And any idea that gets engineers more money, I'm for. Woo.

It doesn’t look like much, but 5 people logged an extra 75 hours in a month, with the vast majority of those extra hours being productive development or design hours (about 63 extra dev/design hours were logged in the working from home month).

At posterous we are doing 3 day a week in-the-office, 2 days from home. Less interruptions = way more coding time. I pulled an all-nighter and got some gnarly architecture work done yesterday that there is NO way I could have gotten done in such a small amount of time if I knew I had to live on a normal schedule and get into the office the next day!

He explained that success in ski racing, or most sports for that matter, was only 40% physical training. The other 60% was mental. And of that, the first 30% was technical skill and experience. The second 30% was the willingness to take risks. With ski racing, specifically, that meant taking the risk of leaning harder into turns, balancing at a steeper angle to the slope, and placing greater pressure on the outside ski edge – all of which increased the chance of falling. My coach explained, though, that if I wasn’t falling at least once a day in training, I wasn’t trying hard enough. Indeed, to improve at anything, we must at some point push ourselves outside our comfort zone. Body builders call it the “pain period.” Only by trying something new, struggling, learning, and then trying again do we improve our performance.

Arbitrary deadlines are, in my opinion, the things that kill most of us. An arbitrary deadline is a date that you circled on the calendar because you wanted to launch something at that time. For no real reason. You are launching a product that will help people wash laundry better than before, you chose June 16th because that is your mother's birthday and that woman could wash socks like nobody's business. Working backwards from that date, you decided that staff had to be hired by February 2. It's Jan 15 and you still haven't found the right people, you're totally stressed, turning into an asshole and it's getting ugly. (And everyone in your house has Swine Flu and you really don't think you have time to care for them right now.)

“The termination that’s going to be coming up is going to be a big problem for the record companies and publishers,” said attorney Greg Eveline of Eveline Davis & Phillips Entertainment Law.

“It’s written into the statute,” said entertainment lawyer Robert Bernstein. “It’s just a matter of time.”

The Copyright Act includes two sets of rules for how this works. If an artist or author sold a copyright before 1978 (Section 304), they or their heirs can take it back 56 years later. If the artist or author sold the copyright during or after 1978 (Section 203), they can terminate that grant after 35 years. Assuming all the proper paperwork gets done in time, record labels could lose sound recording copyrights they bought in 1978 starting in 2013, 1979 in 2014, and so on. For 1953-and-earlier music, grants can already be terminated.

The Eagles plan to file grant termination notices by the end of the year, according to Law.com. “It’s going to happen,” said Eveline. “Just think of what the Eagles are doing when they get back their whole catalog. They don’t need a record company now…. You’ll be able to go to Eaglesband.com (updated) and get all their songs. They’re going to do it; it’s coming up.”

This is awesome! Artists are going to get the cut they deserve, and middlemen get squeezed out of existence. *high five*

Really interesting breakdown. Not a whole lot going in the yellow-green and the magenta, eh?

When you work for others, you are at their mercy. They own your work; they own you. Your creative spirit is squashed. What keeps you in such positions is a fear of having to sink or swim on your own. Instead you should have a greater fear of what will happen to you if you remain dependent on others for power. Your goal in every maneuver in life must be ownership, working the corner for yourself. When it is yours, it is yours to lose -- you are more motivated, more creative, more alive. The ultimate power in life is to be completely self-reliant, completely yourself.

The threshold for the release of the first product should be, 'What would Steve Jobs do?'