blogs
Twitter vs. Yelp for Small Business Owners
On May 19th 2009, I attended the workshop Online Marketing & Social Media for Small Businesses hosted during San Francisco Small Business Week. Twitter and Yelp were among the presenters to try to convince small business owners about the values of their services. Twitter didn't do it convincingly. On contrast, Yelp did a better job.
The room for the event was almost full of people. Most of them are small business owners that took valuable time off to learn about online and social media marketing. So instead of the typical Sillicon valley Meetup where majority of people are technology-centric or so-called xyz media experts, these are the non-typical-valley-users trying to use whatever tools to improve their bottom line.
How to Check Disk Space and Directory Space in Linux
Surprisingly, I often run into the problem of running out of disk space in Linux.
Here are some simple commands to check what consumes the most space:
- "df -k" shows the percentage of disk consumption for each partition
- "du --max-depth 1 -h /" shows how much space each directory under "/" consumes in megabytes
- "du -sm * | sort -n" does the same thing as the previous command
stackoverflow has a good discussion as well.
The Next Battle Field between Yahoo & Google & Microsoft: Email 2.0
Yahoo has already been working on Yahoo Mail Platform to allow 3rd-party developers to write applications enhance Yahoo Mail experience.
Xobni has been enhancing the Outlook experience. I don't know what's the reason of MS not buying Xobni. But Xobni has everything that Outlook and email services ought to have.
Today, Google rolled out new Gmail Lab features to allow preview of youtube, flickr, picasa, Yelp contents whenever they detect relevant links in your emails.
Tags: application api platform email gmail yahoo_mail xobni
How to Fix Firefox Extension Installation/Download Error: "download error -228"
I had consistently ran into the error message "download error -228" whenever I tried to install or upgrade any Firefox extension on my Mac. I followed the Mozilla guide and the Ubuntu thread to try to fix the error. No luck.
I even installed Firefox portable, same problem.
I finally came across the same problem and the right solution.
Data Visualization with Charts. Five Dimensions of Data with Motion Chart
We are constantly getting overloaded with data. Data itself isn't good enough without analysis and insights. We need to be able to visualize data, see trends and get insights. The following is a list of data visualization resources:
- visualization strategies hierarchical data
- Many Eyes from IBM is a bet on the power of human visual intelligence to find patterns
- bewitched.com has a list of data visualization developed.
One advance in charting is motion chart which can show five dimensions.
Tags: google data visualization chart motion
Get Rid of Duplicated Entries/Processes in htop Display
htop is a "top" on steroid Linux utility for interactively viewing processes.
What puzzled me was that some of the process counts seem to be doubled.
I know for a fact that I run two Thin servers(BTW, Thin seems to use less memory than Mongrel). But htop shows 4 processes
3895 root 20 0 187M 95484 3732 S 0.0 9.1 0:55.42 thin server (/tmp/site.1.sock) 3899 root 20 0 187M 95484 3732 S 0.0 9.1 0:03.26 thin server (/tmp/site.1.sock)
My Monetization/Business Plan for Twitter
Looks like it's trendy to talk about how Twitter can make money. There are already user-contributed business plans for Twitter.
I haven't looked into details of all these plans/blogs. But I do have some thoughts about how I'd go about monetizing Twitter as if I am Twitter's product manager:
First, I'd just forget about conventional online advertising(CPC/CPM).
- people are on twitter to have conversations. If you are an advertiser that only cares about getting people off Twitter and go to your site, you don't really use Twitter's conversation workflow to market. You are working against Twitter users' behavior.
Tags: twitter product_management monetization data brand monitor
Too Many Features? How to Prioritize and Trade off Product Features?
When you develop a product, if you run into the problem of having too few features, you should pause building it cause you haven't thought through.
But like most people, you dream of new killer features day and night and end up with too many of them. Unless you are working on a brand new products, you'd have bugs/enhancements to deal with.
Here's my ordered criteria for feature/bug fixing/enhancements prioritization and trade-off:
- Business/Sales/Marketing
- Does it solve customer's problems? Does it address customer's pain points? Stop dreaming of cool features that don't solve actual problems.
Who believes SpyFu's CPC and Ad Budget Estimates?
SpyFu.com is a pretty nice tool to check who competes with whom on paid search with what keywords. It also tries to guess CPC and daily ad budget for a domain or keyword.
Here are the two articles trying to make sense of SpyFu's magic:
My guess is that SpyFu probably uses Google AdWords Traffic Estimator to get CPC, daily click volume, ad position estimates and do some estimation on daily ad budget.
Tags: adwords ppc sem spyfu cpc quality_score competitive_analysis
Eucalyptus - Free Interfacing(Mocking) of Amazon Web Services
Back in Nov. 2008, I attended the informative Eucalyptus talk in the Silicon Valley cloud computing group meetup.
Eucalyptus, the academic project from Professor Rich Wolski at UC Santa Babara, is an open-source software infrastructure for implementing "cloud computing" on clusters. The current interface to Eucalyptus is compatible with Amazon's EC2 and S3 interfaces.
