Thursday, February 28, 2008

Web 2.0

One thing I never appreciate is the latest buzzword. By the time "Web 2.0" became a buzzword, everyone had a hard time explaining it. In a nut shell, it is this. It is the top watch site right now, and it clearly tries to drive the sale of watches online. Its selection is much weaker than #2 and #3, but those two pay Google for their ranking via lots of Pay Per Click advertising.

Enthusiasts want to do more on your site than just shop. Let them.

Wednesday, February 27, 2008

The Bounce Rate

A great lesson in what you don't want to see. How many times do you look at a web site you are designing and have no idea what people really see. When you focus on something, it is hard to see it from the casual person's perspective. But does your organization have the open mind to admit when something isn't working, or are the metrics about rationalizing decisions already made, because it would make you look bad to make a mistake?

An organization that doesn't take mistakes as learning opportunities is an organization which is not taking every opportunity to improve. But such an organization is teaching a lesson: we learn how to bury our mistakes so that we don't have to learn from them.

And burying mistakes rarely improves the bottom line.




What does this have to do with bounce rate? Bounce rate is a failure rate, and failure rates are really the metric we can learn the most from - it is about learning from our mistakes and making things better.

The Beginning

The inspiration for the name of the blog is a quote from Maimonides:

Accept the truth from whatever source it comes

Sometimes we hear the truth from unexpected sources - and we need to be prepared to hear it. The ability to distill correct information and act on it is the most powerful tool anyone will have in life.

This blog will explore the implications of that in business and in life.