The Mac Convert
Judith Hurwitz forms her own opinions about technology. I’ve been a nagging her for years to consider moving to the Mac. She promised to look at the Mac as soon as her current laptop “popped its processor” and that happened recently. So she went to the Apple Store, did some due diligence and then diligently invested in a Mac. The rest of the story is hers to tell. You can read How I learned to love the Mac: confessions of a PC user with a click of the mouse.
It’s not so unusual a story. It’s one of many, but told by an expert in technology evaluation. To celebrate Judith’s conversion, this week I’ll begin some of the Mac-specific coverage that I’ve been meaning to add to this site. You may have noticed that I keep adding new threads to what this blog already contains.
Here’s why:
Almost a year before I started this blogging effort I did a scan of a several prominent blogs. I noticed that, by and large, successful blogs were successful because the authors had writing talent (it’s quite rare) and they focused on areas of genuine expertise. No surprises really. However, what I also noticed was that many blogs that got a great deal of traffic were not well thought-out, well designed or easy to navigate. In particular, because of blog site design, it was inevitable that once a posting was a few weeks old, its level of readership would decline steeply, even if it were still relevant. So I decide not only to write a blog, but to design a blog site.
I will tell you more in future postings, but here’s an interesting aspect of it.
Measuring What’s Popular
There’s no point in writing postings that don’t get readership. It is thus important to know what attracts the reader and what does not. It doesn’t mean that you should never do postings that will not attract much attention. However, you do need to accentuate the positive, even if you don’t eliminate the negative.
So here’s one of the things I do (I learned to do this when I was setting up IT-Director.com; it worked then and it works now):
Every now and then I do a posting which has the word “sex” in its title. “Sex” is a popular topic, and it will draw the attention of readers. Fine. But I use “sex” as a metric. I specifically take note of the level of readership (number of hits) of the stories with “sex” in the title and use that “unit of interest” to discover the interest ratings of other types of posting.
You can tell some of what I’ve learned from looking at the hot listings. One thing you may find surprising is that “interesting new technology” is about twice as popular as sex (i.e. postings on Qliktech, StrikeIron, Cogito and others).The posting I did that listed 10 technology companies to watch was five times as popular as sex – it clearly hit the spot. Apple, sad to say, is only half as popular as sex at the moment, but a negative posting about Microsoft is roughly equal to sex. The technology forecasts that I wrote at the beginning of the year are at least 50 percent more popular than sex and so are the postings about how to deal with analysts. But beyond anything else, the posting Has Linux Finally Broken Through? is ten times as popular as sex, and then some.
The Great British Earthquake
News of the devastating British earthquake never got much attention in the US. Only CNN carried the news and it treated it as a curiosity rather than a real story. As far as the TV is concerned over here, it’s all about US. Thank god for the Internet. Expatriates like myself were more than concerned at the news and had to depend entirely on the web for reports of the disaster. Pretty soon emails were winging there way across the ether carrying this link that shows some distressing photos of the sad aftermath of the quake. I’m not sure whether to send money or sink into depression.
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