Minus Two Messages

Repro that! And it wouldn't be complete without a link back to WorseThanFailure, where you frequently find similar such things.

blist - Techcrunch & Screenshots

blist got written up by Techcrunch over the weekend. More importantly, Techcrunch managed to coax screenshots out of us - which is a pretty big deal. We are very proud of the innovative user interface work we are doing. Exciting stuff!

Ad Of The Day: Legal Persian

Since I read Farsi, I can tell you authoritatively that this website has nothing to do with cats, persian kitty, or other related euphemisms. It's a law firm serving the Persian-American community.

The real moral of the story is much untapped value to be had from innovating in ad-targeting!

Blogging Game Theory

This is one particularly impressive power you get from blogging:

If someone else doesn't blog, and doesn't have too much of a web presence tied to their name, you can just write a blog post with their full name in the title, and say whatever the hell you want - then you own them - anytime a prospective partner, employer, other important person - searches on that particular full name as a quick background check - they see what you wrote.

So, the moral of the story is . . .

The Difference Between Word And Excel

There is a lot of innovation going on in the Office 2.0 department these days. Some great use cases are coming out of it. I've sat across the table from a fellow copywriter - spitballing headline ideas and writing them into the same Google Document at the same time.

But fundamentally, people still use Google Docs or Buzzword (and Buzzword is very cool!) to write stuff - just like they use MS Word.

Excel is a different story. Nearly everyone uses Excel to do things that it wasn't conceived for.

Most people use spreadsheet programs to organize things - but spreadsheets were conceived and designed as an accounting tool. Accounting and organizing are definitely related, but they are definitely not the same thing, either. There is some real innovation to be had around organizing information - phone lists, sales leads, sports schedules, etc.

Other organizers exist, but none have really solved the problem - because none are as flexible, or powerful as a spreadsheet - so that's what most people continue to use.

Viral Coefficients & Equations

Or, an illustration of why marketers are charlatans who make up pseudo-math to give a false appearance of rigor.

Lets begin by searching on the keyword string "VIRAL COEFFICIENT" - all the top results have to do with Internet viral marketing. Now if you were actually using something like a coefficient in any kind of serious way you'd be deriving it and building it into an equation. Lets try searching on the keyword string "VIRAL COEFFICIENT" EQUATION - all the top results are from the natural sciences. I rest my case.

Advancing Usefulness

As Kevin wrote, we spent most of yesterday at the University of Washington computer science department talking to undergrads, grad students, and professors.

These are the kind of people who get really excited about what blist is doing - solving hard problems and really advancing the usefulness that people get out of computers in a fundamental way. People who know what they're talking about get a look at blist and say: 'that's important'.

Really exciting to show off blist to more people, more publicly, than ever before and get such great reactions!