In 2007, as everyone worried about a possible avian flu epidemic, science journalist Laurie Garrett gave this interesting presentation to a small TED university audience. Now, 2 years later, with the current swine flu crisis invading media worldwide, her insights from past pandemics are now more relevant than ever.
Compass is a stylesheet framework (and not only a collection of classes) for Ruby.
Using Compass, you can still use the other css frameworks -blueprint, yui, 960- that are ported to Sass and they are ready to be used in your ruby-based web application or stand-alone via a simple command-line interface.
The framework comes with a detailed documentation on:
You can also watch the podcast on how Compass works.
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Most people who use Twitter will be gone within a month according to newly published figures. Number-crunchers say the trend means Twitter’s past growth rate will be unsustainable.
The figures from web research firm Nielsen Media say that only 40% of people using the site during a month will still be using Twitter the following month. The firm’s David Martin says this retention rate is too low to allow Twitter to continue to grow significantly: “There simply aren’t enough new users to make up for defecting ones after a certain point.” He says that, based on the experience of other membership websites, Twitter will struggle to pass the point where 10% of internet users are members of the site.
Nielsen also noted that the retention rates for rival social networking sites Facebook and MySpace were constantly higher as they developed; when each had an audience the same size Twitter has now, 70% of users were sticking around from month to month (see Nielsen Media image below).
Perhaps the most surprising note from the figures is that for the 12 months leading up to Oprah Winfrey’s publicizing of the site, the retention rate for Twitter was just 30%. Logic would suggest an influx of users who have only just heard about the site through such a mainstream source would be less likely to stick around, not more likely. It could be that those who came in the Oprah bandwagon, reportedly in the hundreds of the thousands, haven’t had enough time to become bored with the site yet.
It’s worth noting that the retention rate covers all users, not just new members. So while the most likely explanation for Twitter’s low rate is new users joining up, taking a look around and getting bored, it’s also possible that established users may be quitting because they feel the site is losing its exclusivity.
There have been some questions about how the figures were put together. If, as some suspect, the figures simply come from visits to the Twitter website, they could be misleading: many users, particular established ones, use standalone applications to post and read Twitter messages.
Ok, this guy is obviously taking things a little too far, but still, we get the message. I’ve always been a big fan of the X300 myself. For portability in the corporate world, there’s no better option.
Oh and one thing Haurum, the X300 is a Lenovo machine, not IBM. IBM has stopped manufacturing laptops a long time ago.
Sure, it makes us feel warm and fuzzy to create great content. But can we actually get any customers with it?
Absolutely, but not if we take the usual blogger’s approach. Money doesn’t drop out of the sky just because we produce high-quality material. We need to put some time, thought and planning into the marketing side of the content marketing equation.
And that means we need to think strategically about how different types of content contribute to the larger persuasion cycle.
Earlier in this series, we talked about the fact that every bit of content needs to be a tasty cookie that rewards your audience for consuming it.
So how can you attract a new audience to come find you? You need something bigger and more exciting than a cookie.
You need a birthday cake.
In other words, a piece of content that’s exciting, that feels special, and that tastes good. (It doesn’t hurt if it also has a great headline.)
Not only that, it has to show your potential audience that you know your stuff and that you solve a worthwhile problem. Otherwise they might enjoy scarfing down your content, but they won’t bother coming back for more.
White papers, special reports, extended tutorials, manifestos and viral video all make excellent birthday cakes. (If you want more ideas, you can find lots more here.)
Contrary to popular belief, you do want marketing messages in your birthday cake content. But they have to be palatable, subtle messages. You’re not closing sales here . . . the birthday cake is just the beginning of the conversation.
Raise questions. Poke around at pain points that you can address in later content. Tell stories that resolve objections. But be subtle about it. The purpose of this content is to get your audience into a receptive state of mind before they start hearing any overt sales messages from you.
Create interest and desire for what you have to offer, but don’t talk too much (if at all) about how you’re going to solve all your audience’s problems and make their lives wonderful.
If your birthday cake is compelling enough, your audience will stick around to find those answers.
And, of course, how does your birthday cake get in front of a new audience? By being remarkable enough to share. If it’s not good enough to link to, bookmark, retweet, and email friends about, it’s not good enough. Keep working on it, or partner with a content expert who can create something exceptional for you.
Good bloggers are fantastic at capturing attention, but sometimes we have a tough time knowing what to do with it.
The answer is to keep delivering compelling messages to our new audience, either using a blog, an email autoresponder, or both.
Here’s where you use content marketing fundamentals to start creating a commercial relationship. Obviously, you still deliver terrific quality. You teach and entertain more than you sell. You use metaphor, rhythm and vivid language to make your writing sing.
But you also use the techniques we teach at Copyblogger to create an audience of buyers, not just fans. You begin to call on your copywriting bag of tricks, adding more persuasive elements to your writing.
You’re still keeping the selling under the radar at this point, especially if you’re using a blog to deliver your content. At this phase, you’re building your case, establishing trust, and increasing the intensity of your audience’s desire.
When you’re ready to take an order, send your loyal fan to a well-crafted landing page. That page does the most explicit selling, with a killer offer and a clear, direct call to action.
There’s definitely an art to writing an effective landing page, but if you’ve primed your audience with a smart content strategy, the landing page doesn’t have nearly as much work to do.
If you don’t see yourself using the hard-sell, high-squeeze tactics of the traditional Internet marketing crowd, but you also don’t want to eat ramen noodles for the rest of your life as a “cool but broke” blogger, you can ignore those two tribes and join what we’re calling the third tribe.
In the third tribe, we take the best elements from hardcore Internet marketing, but we deliver them with the passion, personal voice and credibility that the best bloggers have to offer.
Content marketing is our tribe’s most important tool. In fact, it’s the tool that defines this tribe. Master it, and the game is yours.
So please join us for the rest of the Content Marketing 101 series. Coming up next week is an interview showing how one blogger took sharp, snarky content and turned it into a highly profitable business.
About the Author: Sonia Simone is Senior Editor of Copyblogger and the founder of Remarkable Communication.
Can you imagine this kind of thing happening for real on a large scale? If people would start doing this, I’d probably move as far away from civilization as I can, in a middle of a wood somewhere in the great Canadian north possibly.
[Via TechEblog]
Yep folks, another Transformers 2 trailer has been leaked on the web. This one lets us glimpse at a few new scenes and reveals a little more of the movie’s storyline. Enjoy!
My dad likes to say, "even a blind squirrel finds an acorn now and then." And it's true. You shouldn't pick your strategy by modeling someone else's success. The success might have been strategic and planned, but it's just as likely to be a matter of blind luck. Someone had to get that big deal, and this time it was him.
The numbing reality of the net is that now we can see all the blind squirrels, all the time. A recent piece in the Times talked about bloggers getting six figure book deals in just a few weeks after posting community-driven goofy websites. It's easy to read this and say, "I should do that! I could do that!"
What's missing from the article is that for every 10,000 goofy websites that get launched, one turns into a six-figure book deal and the other 9,999 fade away. If you want to build a goofy website, go for it. Just don't expect to be the lucky squirrel.
MooTools FileManager - a MooTools based File Manager for the web that allows you to preview, upload and modify files and folders via the browser.
Features include:
View Demos:
FileManager + Simple Image Selection + Localized FileManager
