Personal Update

So I'm starting to become a morning person. It was one of my New Year's resolutions this year. I woke up at 6:00 a.m. without too much trouble today, on a Saturday morning. I guess the test of a true morning person is whether or not they wake up early when they don't have to do so.

Well, besides that, my parents are coming to visit at noon today. It was my mom's birthday a couple weeks ago and since we live in different cities, it's the first time I've seen her since Christmas. I'm taking them to China Town for lunch, followed by shopping downtown. I also want to take them to a new coffee house I discovered in Chicago, Noble Tree. It's a pretty cool place. It's three stories and the whole place is gutted so they can have tables and chairs everywhere. I think they'll like it. They, like me, have a thing for coffee shops. I can see them opening up their own one day easily.

The last thing I've done is clean. And do I mean clean. I scrubbed the walls, mopped the floor, dusted everything, and made sure ever corner or cranny is spotless. It wasn't that dirty to begin with, but it's nice to have everything in perfect order. I use products with bleach and like the smell of it, which is kind of weird. It's sort of relaxing to me.

Well, that's all.

P.S. Loved Obama's speech on Tuesday. It was a great first state of the union address.

Where Display and Text Ads Meet

With the the economy in recession, many businesses have begun to re-examine how they spend advertising dollars. Suddenly, return on investment is becoming increasingly important in today's market. Since display ads typically have a lower direct return on investment than search ads, companies have been focusing advertising dollars away from display and into search based ads.

This has had a negative effect on companies like Yahoo who are strong in display type advertising and weaker in search related advertising. According to Yahoo's fourth quarter results, display revenue had dropped 2% while search revenue had increased by 11%. In response to this, Yahoo came up with a really amazing idea, which are "rich ads in search". Basically, now you can search for something on yahoo and instead of a sponsored text add popping up, a picture with, perhaps a company's logo, will be displayed at the top of the search results along with a text based link. Video also has been included in this new program.

While, this new source of revenue is still in the testing stage (only big name companies have been allowed to participate), I thought it was a pretty innovative way of getting your strength (display ads) to work with the current market (a market which is currently seeing a high demand for text ads).

If you want to read more about this business idea, the NYT has a great article on it here.

Are Hulu and iTunes the Small pieces in the Big Pie

There was a lot of talk about the show "Dollhouse" premiering on Fox last week. I didn't watch it (I don't watch TV), but did read about its unimpressive ratings (4.73). Normally, I wouldn't pay much more attention to the show beyond that. However, the show was the most downloaded show on iTunes and the most watched on Hulu. This is an interesting bit of information and really reflects the way scripted TV is heading. Many people believe that iTunes and Hulu (or the Internet) are the future of scripted television.

In response to this, the blog "TV by the Numbers" published this article, which I found really fascinating and it really shows (mathematically) why iTunes and Hulu are a VERY small pieces in a VERY big pie. While I disagreed with some of their math, the point they make is hard to miss - TV Shows make way more money on TV then they do online.

It's not to say, the Internet won't eventually be important to TV. Eventually, the two will merge in the same way that the Internet has merged with video games, cell phones, and many other devices we use. However, this might not be for some time. Meanwhile, The traditional advertising based TV broadcasting format will still be the main concern of TV producers because that's where the money is made.

"What is RSS? RSS SOS"

Since I have been writing a lot about RSS feeds, I figured it might make sense to explain exactly what an RSS feed is and why it's so useful.

First, RSS stands for REALLY SIMPLE SYNDICATION. What does that mean? Well, RSS Feeds are a subscription. Think of it as subscribing to a magazine or an e-newsletter. RSS simply brings information to you. In order to access RSS you need an RSS Reader. In my opinion, the best RSS reader is Google Reader which is free and can be found at www.google.com/reader.

An RSS reader is an application, which can either be located on your desktop or on the web. I like Google Reader because it makes things easy. This application's purpose is to gather all your RSS feeds (this may be articles, updates, or anything else that uses RSS) and display it to you. Then whenever any of your subscriptions are updated, the information will immediately show up on your reader.

Still confused? Let's use an example to explain. Let's say I read the New York Times ever day online. But, let's say I'm only interested in articles which relate to fashion. Well, you can log on to Google Reader and do a search for "New York Times Fashion" and it will display an RSS feed which says "New York Times - Fashion." You'll notice a description of the feed as well as a "Subscribe button." If you click subscribe, you will instantly get any New York Times articles that are fashion related. Each time a new fashion related article is added, it will get sent to your Google Reader for you to read.

Once you add several "feeds" you will find that RSS is a great way to have all the stuff your interested sent to you (in one place) instead of going to several different websites to see if they updated anything that you are interested in. Basically, RSS is a huge time saver and makes it easy to not miss out on anything.

Finally, you should know that RSS Feeds are used for all sorts of things... RSS is used on Craig's List, for newspapers, for magazines, for blogs, for wikipedia, and much much more.

The best way to learn about RSS is to play with it. So go to Google Reader and play around. Hit the Search or Browse Button and type in some of the things your interested in. Hit subscribe (you can always unsubscribe if you don't like it) and find out how useful this tool can be.

Free Language Lessons on iTunes!

I've been learning Russian for quite a few years. I've just discovered something pretty cool for anyone learning a language. You can get free audio lessons on iTunes under the podcasting section!

It's really nice, because pronunciation is one area of language that people usually need help on. It's one thing to read it in a book, but entirely different to hear it spoken aloud.

I did a search for "Russian" in the iTunes search bar and got more results than I can count. Not all of them are great. Some give you just the first 10 lessons free and then direct you to a website where you can buy more (a great business idea actually), but there are some that have a huge archive of lessons. I'm still playing around with which ones I like and dislike, but since they are all FREE it's a no-risk great reward situation.

I also downloaded a few French lessons that seemed pretty nice and easy.

This discovery has only fueled my belief that podcasting is going to grow tremendously over the next few years. There certainly is a lot less competition in podcasting then there is in blogging and it seems like there are good opportunities to sell audio advertising on popular podcasts.

Anyways, I thought it was a cool discovery that I could share.

Cutting the Fat from RSS Feeds

I stopped checking my feeds for a few weeks in Google Reader. Waiting for me was over 10,000 articles to read when I logged on this morning. Instead of reading them, I deleted them all. Sometimes a fresh start is better than catching up.

Next, I went to my podcasts and started deleting my subscriptions. I'm trying to get it under 10 a day. It's nice to have one or two podcasts recap the news so that I know how to pronounce words (such as foreign leaders and such). The rest are mostly motivational or geared toward giving me business ideas. I think 10 is a good number to aim for.

I'm also cutting my twitter tweets I receive (a process which is taking a lot of time). Deleting a lot spam can be a good way to increase the effectiveness of having twitter. The thing I like about twitter is you can find out news hours before the media picks up the issue. Plus it's a nice way to discover some interesting articles or feature I might have missed on Digg or Mahalo. Both of these advantages become more apparent when there is less distraction from junk I'm not interested in.

Basically, I want to cut back on how much I digest (in information) so that the information is more manageable and more focused on the strength of each platform.

Cutting the fat is healthy.

To Do List Tip

Sometimes I can get in a rut and procrastinate for weeks on end. I can put things off until the project becomes bigger and bigger and bigger. Eventually, it becomes too big and doesn't get done.

To solve this, I've came up with a solution which I've been using since High School. I make a "To Do List" everyday. I carry this with me at all times to remind me of what I want to get done. The problem with these lists can be that they can be viewed as one long list of boring things I have to do. Thus, sometimes I procrastinate on starting my list until it's too late and I think "I'll just do it tomorrow."

My trick (and it's been very useful) is to include fun things to do as well. Say I want to watch a certain movie tonight, I put it on my list, or go shopping just to browse, I put it on my list. Those things are objects that I'm going to do, why not include them. I kind of try and alternate fun and boring tasks so It doesn't seem as bad. It works great for me.

When you add time frames (Time Boxing) to the mix, I find that I accomplish everything I wanted in a day, including fun activities.

It's not me, It's you.

If your looking for some great new music, I highly recommend Lily Allen's new Album "It's Not Me, It's You."

It's clever, memorable, and enjoyable. I've been listening to it non stop.

The best songs are "Who'd of known," "Everyone's at it," and "The Fear."