Ken Dyck

Steve Pavlina has some tips for building a high-traffic website:

My traffic-building strategy isn’t based on tricks or techniques that will go out of style. It’s mainly about providing genuine value and letting word of mouth do the rest. Sadly, this makes me something of a contrarian today, since I happen to disagree with much of what I’ve seen written about traffic-building elsewhere. I do virtually no marketing for this site at all. My visitors do it for me, not because I trick them into doing it but simply because they want to.

Here are 10 of my best suggestions for building a high traffic web site…

Guy Kawasaki shares some of the lessons he’s learned in hindsight. One in particular caught my attention:

4. People act like their last names sound. People may start to look like their dogs, but I think that they act like their last names sound. For example, I have a buddy named Will Mayall. He helps me with anything technical; for example, when I ask him if he can make my web site or blog do something, his initial response is, “I may be able to” and then two hours later he’s done it “all.” Hence, “may all.” Similarly, there’s Jean-Louis Gassée. He’s a funny guy–always armed with a great (usually sexual) metaphor to explain anything. He is a “gas” for the things that he “says”–hence, “gas say”. Then there’s Kawasaki–my high school football teammates told me that I was a “cow’s ass sagging.”

As you might guess, this didn’t find this observation encouraging.

And for those of you who might be wondering, I pronounce my last name so that it rhymes with sick, not psyche. Not that either pronunciation is all that flattering.

Cory Doctorow writes of a proposed bill that would regulate analog-to-digital converters:

The entertainment industry, always a bastion of media savvy, has proposed its “A-Hole” bill as a legal means of limiting the conversion of analog music and video to digital files. Under the bill, every maker of a device that can convert analog signals to digital ones (like iPods, camcorders, and PCs) would be required by law to be built with a detector for a proprietary watermarking technology called VEIL (the use of free/open source in these technologies would be outlawed to prevent the removal of VEIL detectors).

I wonder if the law would apply to digital hearing aids. Besides lowering the capabilities of hearing aids — today’s hearing aid processors are already squeezed to the last cycle in an effort to provide better audio so any additional processing to detect watermarks will come at the direct expense of reduced audio quality — such a law would also have the consequence of prohibiting the hard-of-hearing from listening to recorded music.

It’s surprising that such a bill would even be considered as it is relatively simple for anybody to build an analog-to-digital converter from components that can be found Radio Shack. Schematics can be found in most introductory electronics texts. Anybody intent on ripping audio from CDs could set themselves up with a few days of hacking.

I also wonder what effect such a law would have on the makers of anti-lock braking systems, which also use analog-to-digital converters; not to mention medical equipment, industrial controllers, and avionics.

In the spirit of The Long Emergency, one of the most frightening books I’ve ever read, Dave Pollard explains why oil prices are jumping again.

Guy offers some advice on how to kick butt on a panel:

Today I moderated a very good panel at a conference, and while this experience is fresh in my mind, I want to explain how to kick butt on a panel. At any given conference, there are about three keynote speakers and twenty five panelists, so the odds are much higher that you’ll be a panelist than a keynote speaker. Thus, I hope this entry appeals to a broader audience.

Note to self: Reread this before EclipseCon.

Larry Borsato announced today that Bleezer is shipping:

If you are a blogger, Bleezer will give you the ability to post to all of your blogs, regardless of what service you use, on any platform you want. The Bleezer website also has a blog so that you can keep up with new features and versions.

Larry has been cranking away on Bleezer over the past couple months. When Larry first told me about Bleezer in late November, I really wasn’t expecting very much. He’d been working on it for only a few weeks at that point, and it showed. I couldn’t even post an article to my blog with the first version I offered to beta test. But as we came through December, Larry got on a roll, fixing bugs and adding features faster than I could keep up. Before I knew it he’d tranformed Bleezer into a surprisingly capable blogging client.

Don’t get me wrong, Bleezer is still fairly bare-bones, but Larry has some big ideas for it, and at the rate he’s been going at it lately, I’m guessing they aren’t that far off.

If you like to give it a spin, you can download it for yourself from the Bleezer website.

Congratulations, Larry, on getting it out. And thanks for fun tool.

The CBC has written a pseudoblog to accompany a docudrama that aired last night. They call it the next pandemic blog:

The Next Pandemic Blog is a fictional portrayal of a hypothetical pandemic of H5N1 avian influenza – from initial outbreak through mass transmission to global spread.

Although a blog in only the loosest sense of the word — the content is static and pre-written out into June 2006 by a fictitious character — it’s an interesting read.

Obviously this shouldn’t be confused with some of the CBC’s more serious ventures into the blogosphere.

Paul Kedrosky calls it catnip for bloggers. Introducing egoSurf.

My current standings:

• google.com: 8386
• yahoo.com: 7987
• msn.com: 4354
• del.icio.us: 0
• technorati.com: 7806

Fun stuff.

Rick Mercer has put together a rather humourous fantasy cabinet for the Conservative Party:

I have it on very good authority however that Stephen Harper is spending a lot of time playing the game these days. Word is the back room on the Harper bus resembles the woodshed from A Beautiful Mind; the walls are littered with the names of potential conservative cabinet ministers. Luckily my secret mole in the Tory Campaign (Tom Flannagan) has been taking photos of the notes with his hand held palm device and forwarding me the information on a daily basis. This is what the Tory Cabinet looks like so far.

Out of curiosity, I took the autism spectrum quotient test that Steve Pavlina mentioned in today’s post. The result of the test is a score that indicates your level of autism:

• 0-10: low
• 11-22: average (most women score about 15, and most men score around 17)
• 22-31: above average
• 32-50: very high (most people with Asperger Syndrome or high functioning autism score about 35
• 50: maximum

I managed to score a 29, just three points away from the ‘very high’ category. Now I’ve always known that I’m an introvert, but that result came as a bit of a shock.

I guess I’d better find a Toastmasters’ club. And fast.