Hello!!

I love music, my site Sax Station is all about saxophone.  Figured I would put other music stuff on this site.

Last year I saw Jake Shimabukuru at the Monterey Jazz Festival.  He put on a great show.

Just saw this TED video and really liked it.  Sir Ken Robinson delivers his talk well with some humor and makes his points very clear.  It’s a followup talk to another one that he gave.  Maybe things will move in a new direction…

Sir Ken Robinson: school kills creativity

Watch on TED

Tim has been playing around with Digg a bit, and I have seen interviews he has done with the CEO Kevin Rose.

For him, posting at 7AM PST and 6PM EST tend to work well (for Digg).

And he suggesting posting on Friday night. That worked for him anyway, your audience may or may not work well with these times.

A small, but powerful tweak for you blog is to change the word ‘category’ to ‘topics’ since Tim Ferriss found this dramatically improved clicks.

He also has been putting ‘most popular’ posts in the upper right. He hired someone to write some code to update these automatically.

Tim uses the stats program within wordpress- since then you can see what phrases people are looking for on your site and possibly keep that in mind when you write future posts.

He leaves his twitter feed lower down on the blog page though. You want people to stay on your site for a while, not immediately go off to twitter (or youtube).

To start off his talk, Tim Ferriss talked about how you can use a blog for meeting people. In terms of your business, it can be an effective tool to indirectly make sales.

Perry Belcher describes a blog as being like inviting people to your house for a party. You don’t want to sell them something immediately. It’s more something to have them get to know you.

Tim went on to talk about crazyegg.com and how he uses a heat map test to help make homepage revisions. He sees where people’s mouses go to on the page and then figures out what he wants their eyes to be drawn to.

He also found that Germans click on ‘Tim’s Favorites’ but Americans don’t- they seem to like ‘popular posts’ much better.

I was on digg earlier, and saw a T-shirt with this on it:

“Heave is where the the police are British, the chefs Italian, the mechanics German, the lovers French and it is all organized by the Swiss.
Hell is where the police are German, the chefs British, the mechanics French, the lovers Swiss, and it is all organized by the Italians.”

That being said, the same group of people are involved in each situation, it is only their roles that change.

Think about how it applies to you- you might be a great writer, but a terrible artist.  If that’s true, you wouldn’t want to spend all your time trying to design graphics.  Or you might have someone working for you who is great at one thing- have them do what they are great at and things will run much more smoothly.

Google just released a tool to visually see how search results are related.

Basically, you just type in your search and then go to the options when the search results are displayed.

One option is ‘wonder wheel’

Google announced ‘Wonder Wheel’ on May 12, 2009 at the Searchology event.

I learned a lot from Wordcamp 2009!

Matt Mullenweg, CEO of wordpress was awesome- super sharp, helpful, and really humble too.

The first speaker besides Matt, was Tim Ferriss.  He gave some great tips.

The first idea he presented was that blogging gives you access to people and resources.  It’s not always about making money (though it can indirectly).

I’ll post more tomorrow.

Hey,

I’m going to Wordcamp 2009 this Saturday.  Should be interesting.  Tim Ferriss is speaking in the mornning and I think I will meet some interesting people.

From cogdogblog on flickr

“Basketball “Hang Time” Physics” http://bit.ly/cmKP5

“Buddy Rich vs Animal on drums” http://bit.ly/DWOw3