July 24, 2009
Yesterday I was listening to one of Leo Laporte‘s podcasts, which I believe is broadcast nationally on radio as well. I had several times seen him record it in his Twit video channel, but had never listened to him without seeing him.
Two things struck me as I listened.
First, that Leo has a very cool radio voice. Trent Hamm, a FriendFeed user, described it perfectly: “strong, deep, authoritative tones, yet still warm and inviting”.
Second, that Leo’s technologic complexity on the show is right in the middle: not too complex, not too simple.
Leo is really admired and has a very loyal and large following. He has 137,000+ followers on Twitter and this Twit shows are always buzzing with people who ask him stuff, but also help him in things he doesn’t know.
I think Leo knows more about technology than he shows or broadcasts. He has his ideal point really figured out. Of course, he’s done it for years, first on ZDTV, then TechTV and now with his own channels.
I’m thinking about many other technology newsmakers with decent following and they always seem, to me, that they weren’t advanced in their technology knowledge. They’re not hardcore programmers like I am.
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July 20, 2009
Back in the early days of the web, I worked in this small startup funded by a large public company. Life was good. We were pioneers heading into an uncharted jungle.
One of the first things we were discussing was how to measure the success of our web operation. Back then a lot of people were talking about “hits”, which seemed like a bad metric, as each hit would be an individual element on the page (like a page with 4 images would result in 5 hits). We decided to use pageviews instead.
We also knew we wanted to track unique visitors per month (i.e. if one visitor visits 5 times in a month, he’s counted as 1). This would tell us how many actual visitors were coming to our site.
But we knew there was something missing from this picture. We also wanted to know how well we were keeping our users “hooked” into our content. We decided to also have repeat visitors as part of our top goals and measurements.
This really worked. Even though the site was content centric (it was a network of radio station websites), we managed to add a lot of social features to it, so that users had a reason to come back often.
Today, I don’t hear about repeat visits any more in any of the business circles I move in. I hear a lot about user engagement and “let’s get a ton of traffic” or “how do I get more followers”.
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