Friday, December 21, 2007

Is Your Content Truly Customer-Focused?

So many web sites have a couple of fundamental flaws: they aren’t written from the customer’s perspective, and the content doesn’t help users complete common site tasks.

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DIY Recording Fame

Who needs the record label companies to become famous? Not Ingrid Michaelson, a singer-songwriter whose self-produced Girls and Boys recently hit #2 on the iTunes charts. Her road to fame was via a MySpace page.

Earlier this month Sarah VanNevel’s post related the story of Tay Zonday, a singer who rose out of obscurity via YouTube. Ingrid Michaelson’s path using the Internet is a similar story with some even bigger implications. In literally six months, Michaelson went from being an unknown to performing at sold out concerts and having her songs featured on the hit TV series “Grey’s Anatomy” (see her “Keep Breathing” on YouTube).

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Thursday, December 20, 2007

A New Tool To Visualize The Political Process

The 2008 presidential election year is almost upon us. It’s two weeks until the Iowa Primary (Jan 3), and followed quickly in five days by the New Hampshire primary (Jan 8). You can easily see the odds on who will win these and other primaries with a new dashboard tool at Yahoo. You’ll find tabs on the dashboard for both national and state polls.

What’s interesting is that much of information on the Yahoo political dashboard is fed from data at RealClearPolitics. While the RealClearPolitics site is useful and traditionally presents much of the same information as the Yahoo page, the dashboard is much easier to use and to see at a glance what is transpiring.

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Tuesday, December 18, 2007

Take The Naughty or Nice Test

The Inquiz-i-tron from Sundog Laboratories measures whether you are naughty or nice. Take the short test and see how you score.

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Monday, December 17, 2007

Does Prime Rib Predict the Polls?

As 2007 comes to a close and the 2008 presidential election rapidly approaches, Americans are beginning to gear up for another crazy campaign season. For those who find CNN sponsored Gallup polls and media reports dry and sometimes hard to follow, restaurant blog Urbanspoon has developed a creative new method for predicting election results, one that taps into the power of consumer tastes and Google Trends.

The inventive new prediction system, called the “Steak/Sushi Index,” measures voting trends in cities based on the number of sushi restaurants found in the area compared to the number of steak restaurants in the same radius. 

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