Friday, October 10, 2008

Hopefully, This Isn’t A Metaphor For Your Marketing Strategy

Weiner Dog Races

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Monday, October 06, 2008

Turtles vs. Giraffes

Many people I know in the business community keep talking about the rough, present-day economic climate that we face in the immediate future. There seems little doubt that companies everywhere are going to have to ask some difficult questions. Unless you are in a business that is relatively immune from our challenging business climate — say perhaps a publisher specializing in economic doom and gloom books – it seems a certainty that growth, or even stability, is not going to come from grabbing an upward trend in consumer or B2B spending.

So how does a company maintain or grow when the economy is in disrepair? Economic downturns seem to create either a turtle or giraffe mentality among businesses, and the turtles, by far, make up the majority.

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Sunday, October 05, 2008

Worldwide Air Traffic

Above is another interesting interactive infographic that illustrates 24 hours of worldwide air traffic. Check out the higher resolution graphic here for much better detail.

This chart not only conveys air traffic, but it is easy to see when it is prime time for travel on each continent. Not only that, it clearly shows where economic development is going on (and where it isn’t). Good data visualization such as this will become requisite in a world that creates 281 exabytes of information annually.

Thanks to kottke.org for the point on the air traffic info.

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Friday, October 03, 2008

Does URL Rewriting Help or Hinder SEO?

A common tenet of modern Web development is to avoid long, obscure strings of characters in your URLs. So, for example, if your page’s URL looks like this…

http://www.mysite.com/view_product.xyz?id=ew44ds63f5hdvds98fdld2b

...it should really look like this instead:

http://www.mysite.com/products/kittylitter

The conversion of the former URL into the latter is known as “URL rewriting,” because it converts a long, ugly query string into a short, clean Web address. URL rewriting typically requires a special Web development framework or server module, but it has many advantages.

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Toyota Puts Pedal to the Marketing Metal with 0% Financing

Amidst the credit-crunch rollercoaster, Toyota is going all out nationally with a 0% financing incentive on 11 models. A spokesperson said they have the inventory and capacity through Toyota’s own financial services division for this huge financing and leasing push.

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