Patterns: 14 Snow Plows and 122 Science Projects

This morning was snowy in Toronto. The radio created excitement about how bad the weather was. In truth, the weather wasn't that bad. The snow blower quickly cleared the driveway. Major streets were well-plowed. I drove downtown on bus routes.

On Dundas Street, I saw 14 snow plows in groups of 2-3 within 15 minutes. Luckily, they were going in the opposite direction. There were also five police cars on my route. Probably a coincidence.

What's Odd
Here's what's really odd. The plows weren't plowing. The snow was already removed. I'm guessing they were en route to plow side streets. The plows were were inadvertently affecting three groups

1. folks waiting in side streets
2. the traffic snailing behind them
3. the inquisitive (bloggers?!?) wondering what was going on
   

Fortunately, I got to all my meetings on time and so did the other attendees.

The Science Projects
We visited a grade 6-8 Science Fair at my son's school in the evening. With so many projects beside one another, patterns became easy to spot:

1. text fonts too small to read from a distance: with PowerPoint what looks big on a computer screen looks small when projected
   
2. weird colour combinations: too much creativity reduced readability
   
3. too much content: difficult to grasp the main message instantly
   
4. sea of sameness: looking for interesting differences
   
5. seeking out winners: endorsement by judges made those projects seem better than they perhaps were (placebo effect)
   
6. research done online: can your clients find you online?
7. varying attention to detail: some did/didn't put their heart into their work
8. conclusions hard to find: the conclusions didn't stand out even though they were generally where expected --- the bottom right hand quadrant
   

It's unfair to judge kids by the same standards as as our clients judge us. We can still learn lessons, though. Students have an advantage: they get marks and get guidance. Clients rarely tell us how we did and how to get better.

A Better Email Notification Service For You

Here we grow! You can now get email notifications of new posts from Feedburner, which Google bought for $100 million US in June 2007. As usual, Google made the service better and cheaper. The purchase shows how relevant blogging has become. As of today Feedburner burns blog feeds for 1,322,961 feeds for 743,793 publishers (see statistics).

Growing Pains
There's no seamless way to transfer your email addresses from the old service which was discontinued last month. For your protection, anti-spam laws require that you opt-in again. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Please resubscribe by clicking on the links below

• subscribe to Marketing Actuary by email or newsreader
  
• subscribe to Riscario Insider (for consumers) by email or newsreader
  

During the transition, you may have missed

• Who's Reading: The Top 5 Posts of 2007
• Three Communication Tips: Jokes, Length , Offense
  
• How Would You Sell Soap?

What Happened to Zookoda
Australia-based Zookoda was terrific. A few months ago, they were purchased by controversial PayPerPost (now called IZEA), which pays bloggers to write posts that look real but are actually advertising (see Polluting the Blogosphere in BusinessWeek). A bad sign. Service did not improve.

Zookoda couldn't cope with spammers. On December 21, 2007, they suspended all broadcasts to make major changes. There was no advance warning or exemption for honest bloggers. Like me :(

Zookoda restored service on Jan 9 but there have been serious mixups. Content went to the wrong subscribers. I stopped using Zookoda last week after Spanish content was sent out.

Plan B
I'd been experimenting with another email service: Feedburner, which is now owned by Google. (Aside: my blog is hosted by Blogger, which Google bought in 2003, enhanced, and relaunched in 2007. Traffic is tracked by Google Analytics.) The service is very reliable but less flexible. Unfortunately, there's currently no way to move the mailing list from Zookoda.

New readers can now only subscribe via Feedburner. What about existing readers? You can

• re-subscribe to Marketing Actuary by email or newsreader
  
• re-subscribe to Riscario Insider by email or newsreader

Again, my sincere apologies for the inconvenience.