Archive for December, 2007
I am here on a Saturday night building my plan for my business, and I just found an excellent tool for generating flow charts. It is called Gliffy. With a free account you can create flow charts, network diagrams and parent-child type diagrams. It is a pretty good tool and I was able to get charts pretty easily and they look beautiful. Enjoy!
While doing market research for a client I happened across the site for Neuro-Programmer 2 by The Transparent Corporation. The software, they claim, "stimulates Brainwaves while using Hypnosis, NLP and other Psychological techniques to help you transform your mind and enhance your mental abilities."
You can see a screenshot here of a "brainwave training session"(I wonder why the ADHD session is headphone free?):
I guess we have come a long way from a gold stopwatch going back and forth in front of the subject.
I have been taking the TTC to work since August or so and I find that it is busier now than it has been in the seven or so years I have lived in the city. My boyfriend who has been here for 25 years says he has never seen it worse. He now stands and watches several trains go by in the morning before being able to get on.
Meanwhile, being an entrepreneur able to set my own hours, I am gaming the system, trying to come and go on less busy times. It is okay in the morning – if I leave at 9:00 the Bloor-line subway is usually free enough, and I can usually get a spot on the Spadina streetcar.
But… the problem is the evening. If I leave at 6:30, 7:30 and even beyond 8:00… it is always having a sardine-like atmosphere in the streetcar with the bodies of Toronto squished together and it is standing-room only on the subway. The Toronto automotive rush-hour does not last that long, so why should the public transit one be so extended? There is obviously a problem here.
The province is now stepping in to try to take the heat off of the city with a facelift to the GTA transit agency calling it Metrolinx. The chair Rob MacIsaac said the following recently:
"Be bold. Look around the world to see what other cities are doing," said MacIsaac. "In a couple of decades, we’ll be as big as London is today. We should be thinking in those terms."
He says London… but lately the line-ups for the streetcars look more like Communist Moscow.
Well – today marks my first year of blogging. It has been a pretty good year and I have unexpectedly met some great new people through the blog, along with rediscovering some old friends. The main point of the blog was to take myself out of the anonymity of the web. I had been posting for years under different aliases, always keeping my internet life separate from out there in RL (real life). The year of it coming together has made for some interesting situations – especially in my family and work life.
So – to commemorate this event, I thought it would be fun to check out my competition on certain topics online using Nielson’s BlogPulse tool… and here is what I came up with:
So – basically this tool measures what blog topics are popular online. I put "sex" as a baseline, assuming that was something that lots of people were talking about (I am very curious to see what was happening on that large dip between Nov 17-Nov 23, my guess is that something happened where people were not as interesting as sex, or maybe people were so busy having sex that they couldn’t write about it 
).
Anyway, two topics that I frequent on this blog are both Marketing and Feminism. I see that Marketing follows a Monday-Friday type of pattern, similar to a typical B2B site and Feminism has a paltry 0.01% share of internet traffic, or less than 1% of the share of "sex". Very interesting and it may explain some things (likely the mindshare the feminism holds compared to the mindshare of sex? But, using the internet as a model for the brain may be dubious).
Looking forward to another year of blogging, sharing more ideas and meeting more interesting people.
In learning about negotiations, I remember studying the “anchor”, you can see HBS discussing the anchor here:
Research into human judgment has found that how we perceive a particular offer’s value is highly influenced by any relevant number that enters the negotiation environment. Because they pull judgments toward themselves, these numerical values are known as anchors. In situations of great ambiguity and uncertainty, first offers have a strong anchoring effect—they exert a strong pull throughout the rest of the negotiation. Even when people know that a particular anchor should not influence their judgments, they are often incapable of resisting its influence. As a result, they insufficiently adjust their valuations away from the anchor
.
Lately, I have realized that I have had a “fitness anchor”, a level of fitness determined by the friends around me. I generally think of myself as pretty fit – able to go on 100k bike rides, lifting relatively heavy weights (for a girl of course). Even at an aerobics class the other week the instructor commented on the fitness of my core due to many months of consistent yoga practice. But – since Lori, one of my fittest friends, started training for competitive Mixed Martial Arts, my anchor has been reset. You can see her training regimen on her Jiu-Jitsu Sensei Blog here:
We went through a series of conditioning exercises, including: 100 squats, 60 leg lunges, 2 minutes of jumping up and down from the ring, 2 minutes of sit-ups (while lifting a 4kg medicine ball up over the head then passing it back to my partner), 2 minutes of sprawl push-ups (while passing the medicine ball back and forth with my partner in between), 2 minutes of doing boxing punches with resistance bands. And after that, we started our skills training.
So – with my anchor reset by Lori’s example, I am stepping up my fitness routine by adding more weight workouts and two spinning workouts a week. This whole situation has reminded me how much your friends and people around you influence you and your decisions in life… and it has made me think how my friends anchor me in different ways, both positively and negatively. How about you?
Like most people, I am always trying to increase my energy levels in order to do all the stuff that I want to do. My old approach was caffeine – if I pour a lot of coffee/tea on the problem, I will feel alert, energetic and will be able finish it all.
But in the past year or so, I have changed my approach. I’ve realized that instead of trying to ignore my natural energy lows and simply add stimulants, I have been working on calming myself as much as possible leading nonintuitively to MORE energy, not less.
So – I am doing things like yoga, meditation and even acupuncture. I also (painfully) ended my relationship with caffeine earlier this year. For acupuncture, the only analogy I can make to the feeling is that relaxing feeling that comes over me when I have a drink after a very hard day (without the hangover part of course). As a result of all of this, I am much more energetic, with the added benefit of being much better able to handle the stress around owning my own business.
I was speaking to a young client about this a few weeks ago. In her early-to-mid-twenties, this woman is still learning the ropes. I remember how I was in her position – working very hard, but also high strung and stressed out. Conversely, this woman is quite calm and easy-going. I find this approach quite inspiring – and I told her so!
I think as a society we keep turning to expensive super-drugs to resolve both physical and psychological diseases, but I believe that simply handling and reducing stress would resolve it much more effectively. We generously donate to million-dollar breast-cancer campaigns or campaigns for heart and stroke… but really stress is a big contributor to both diseases.
Unlike in the pharmaceutical industry, there CEO watching the market or no network of Marketing Managers and Account Reps who have bonuses riding on how many yoga or acupuncture sessions are sold. So – a mass-effort towards stress-reduction will be a grass-roots initiative… by people who can see that stress doesn’t give you life-energy, it takes it away.
I have been doing research for a client on display advertising (some may still know it as banner advertising but really that name represents only one size) lately, and was surprised by some of the findings. Here is some stuff I wanted to share publicly:
- The typical clickthrough rate is between 0.1-0.3%. Clickthroughs on display advertising has been going down since the beginning of the internet (In the 90s people clicked on banners out of curiosity, now people are less enthusiastic).
- Display advertising accounted for 22% of the US Internet Advertising revenue in 2006. This is well below the 56% market share it had in 1999 before search marketing came along.
- More targeted ads get a higher clickthrough, at about 0.5%
- Video ads increase clickthrough to 0.4% (doubling from the typical 0.2%) .
- Behavioral and demographic targeting also increase clickthrough rate to up to 1.5% .
I got these results from both public resources and by phoning a dozen or so sites and ad networks. I am very surprised how low the clickthroughs are on display advertising – just another reason to stick with search marketing.
When I saw the Dali Lama a while ago, one criticism he had of Western culture was that he found that we are too preoccupied with what happens in our own lifetime. He said that we should really take a longer view – a several lifetime view. So – I guess the Dali Lama would be disappointed in this post. I am writing about Karma that happens within one lifetime instead – even within one year.
Back in July, I wrote about my friend’s husband in: How to Disappear Completely and Never be Found:
I have been preoccupied as of late with two men. Or – more specifically, two husbands of friends, who have left their young families, one with a baby only weeks old, and have decided to pursue lives with new girlfriends. I see my friends juggling everything – the shock, the kids, the learning to live with less while the husbands go on luxury vacations with their new, younger girlfriends. They have moved on with their lives, pursued new relationships and are seen as different people. Their old life has disappeared completely and cannot be found without real effort.
Well, last weekend, my boyfriend and I went up North to one of the friends mentioned above to meet the kind, funny and thoughtful man she is dating. It felt so incredible to see her with her regular happy glow and natural smile back. Also, since July when I wrote the post, her ex-husband has asked for her back and she said "no". So – for the ex-husband, the luxury vacation of escape is over. For my friend, a wonderful life has opened up for her. You see – sometimes karma happens faster than you think. Also – it seems disappearing does not last for that long or that completely.
I would like to apologize for my lack of blogging lately. I have been building a business which is time-consuming on many levels. My approach to my new business is to first get a feel for the market, then create a business plan. So – the time for the plan is now – which is a daunting task.
The craving is to continue without structure and keep on finding whichever kind of business I want like a stream of consciousness – but structure is what makes the business tangible. When you think about it, a business is a figment of the imagination… a creative act. I know that the business culture tries to make it solid and stable seeming… but I think that is just a shared illusion enacted to attract investors. A business, unlike a work of art or writing doesn’t take a single form. You can’t quantify it into your product, your store or yourself. It is more than all of these things. Which is one reason why businesses are so hard to value.
So – the plan is the way to give the business shape. And – of course, choosing not to have a shape also creates something… a business shaped by random forces instead of by the hand of a designer. So – in the coming weeks, more blogging… more planning… and hopefully more sleeping 
.
Analytics App Art Baby Beauty Books Business Canada Charity Economics Education Entrepreneurship Funny Health Ideas Individualism Inspirational Life Hack Life in General Lists Marketing Movies Office Life Personal Development Poetry Politics Psychology Quarterly Goal Setting Reviews Right vs. Normal Social Theory Sophie Spirituality Technology Tips & Hints Toronto USA Web Web Marketing Wish Women World
