| LED Digest 1939: The Silver Lining, also Billable Hours |
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================================================== The LED Digest Moderated Discussion List "Effective Online Advertising, Since 1997" pair Networks: The LED's Web Host Hosting and Domain Reg. from a Trusted Leader pair.com for Hosting | pairNIC.com for Domains ================================================== List Moderator: Published by: Adam Audette LED Digest This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it http://www.led-digest.com .............................................. March 2, 2005 Issue #1939 .............................................. .....IN THIS DIGEST..... ====== NEW ===================== --== Total Hours vs Billable Hours ==-- ~ Brian Rideout "Last year my crew...hit about 22% of their total time worked as billable hours." ==== CONTINUING ================= --== RSS Feeds, Spam, and The Future of Publishing ==-- ~ Rich Dudley "...27% of internet users read blogs, but 62% don't know what a blog is." ~ Phil Tanny "...there are silver linings here, and we've earned the right to harvest them." ~ Don Van Holt "Why fight spam, we should embrace it and charge the sender for it." ~ Tom Aman "...our email systems are based on a standard that is over 2 decades old..." ==== BILLBOARD =================== --== PodCasting ==-- ~ Steven Rothberg --== MSN Search ==-- ~ Mike Banks Valentine ======== NEW ==================================== From: Brian Rideout Subject: Billable Hours vs Total Hours... Hi all, This is a question geared to small web development firms with at least two employees besides the guy or gal that wears all of the other hats. :-) Last year my crew of 2+ designers / programmers hit about 22% of their total time worked as billable hours. Problem is I don't know if that's good or bad. I don't expect anywhere near 100%, but wondered if we couldn't do better too. Anyone else have any experience doing this kind of tracking??? Or do you have a better method for determining how productive the staff is??? Any thoughts are welcome... I'm on digest mode so if you want an immedite reply better send it to me directly... Brian Rideout [just to avoid any possible confusion... this list is only offered in a digest form. :-) -adam] ===== CONTINUING ================================= From: Richard Dudley Subject: RSS and more > I think the answer is to offer your readers choice... - Joe Halbrook, LED 1938 I'm with Joe on this one. For BloomeryWeddings.com, we have a subscription e-mail list with planning tips and monthly specials. The circulation is never tremendous, since brides usually only stay on it for the duration of their engagement. Over the past several years, we've found less and less interest in e-mail subscriptions. We've heard the usual suspects -- too much spam, don't like to give out e-mail address (despite strong and simple privacy policy). Also, the e-mails were not indexable by the search engines, and thus not doing us much good outside of our small readership. But some brides loved the idea of an e-mail newsletter. I'll be adding a blog to the site in the next few days -- one of my New Year's resolutions I fnally have time for. One advantage to the blog is that spiders will be able to index the information. We plan to keep it packed with planning tips and other useful advice. Brides (typically a more Inetrnet savvy bunch than the general population) can anonymously subscribe and unsubscribe to the RSS feed as they wish. But we'll still keep the e-mail list. Since the blog is easier to use than Constant Contact, more information will end up on the blog than in the e-mail newsletter. But the monthly specials will continue to be distributed via both mechanisms in the near future. One nice part of the blog app I chose (DasBlog, an ASP.NET based blog app from www.dasblog.net) is that it can parse e-mail messages and create blog entries. I don't think the capabilities are enough for a complete e-zine, but they are certainly sufficient for a specials announcement or hot planning tip. We're kind of at the leading edge of this trend. A recent survey from the Pew Inetrnet and American Life project found that 27% of internet users read blogs, but 62% don't know what a blog is. You can find a link to the study at http://snipurl.com/d5m6 [dotnetjunkies.com] (yes, that's my technical blog -- just doing my part to increase that 27%). Rich Dudley www.bloomeryweddings.com ------- new post - same topic -------- From: Phil Tanny Subject: RSS Feeds, Spam, and The Future of Publishing Thanks for an insightful discussion on the email/RSS thread. Great reading! I'm especially sympathetic to David Yancey and others who express the sentiment that threads on the possible end of bulk email "are almost too painful to read". Bulk email has been the very best thing to happen to my 30 year career, and saying goodbye isn't easy. But there are silver linings here, and we've earned the right to harvest them. However and whenever we might move to RSS, it's great to have that option, and the hope we might eventually finally get it right. Upon reflection I find I'm less attached to bulk email specifically than I am to it's original promise of empowering everyone with something useful to say. If we remain flexible, brave, and loyal to that original premise, we'll fulfil that promise one way or another. There are bigger silver linings here for us, if we're willing to accept delivery of the gift. It's possible spam is the best thing to come out of the bulk email era. Empowering individuals with technology is great. Really great! Except... This empowerment threatens the power balance that has existed for eons between the 95% of us who are willing to try to work together constructively as a community, and the 5% who are lost in destructive self centered isolation. Most of us realize this will be the story line of the next century. The phenomena of spam illustrates this new reality clearly in a way that is, while highly annoying, not fatal. Spam is like September 11, 2001, without the caskets. A wake up call. As a new global era dawns we're being offered the opportunity to reflect upon why we the 95% have lost the bulk email battle to the criminal 5%. I believe you and I are being offered this opportunity because we're pioneers in the communication medium that will likely dominate this new era. You and I run the radio station, and somebody is ringing our phone with a helpful message. Will we pick up? If you pick up, and can get some of the message, why don't you post what you hear. I'll do the same. Perhaps we can piece it together. Challenging times. And silver linings, wherever we're willing to see them. Phil Tanny http://links-for-you.com ------- new post - same topic -------- From: Don Van Holt Subject: Curing spam Why fight spam, we should embrace it and charge the sender for it. I can't send you a post card without paying for it so why should spam e-mailers abuse the service for free? If a service was to process e-mail and a fee of 10 cents per e-mail was charged for an unsolicited e-mail the recipient would collect 1/2 or 5 cents for each unsolicited e-mail. If the e-mail was accepted by the recipient he would mark it as accepted and it would be free of any charges. That would take care of two things at once, allow spammers to continue spamming and it would compensate the recipients for their brutal waste of time. Thanks, Don Van Holt, Webmaster http://nyfd.com/ ------- new post - same topic -------- From: Tom Aman Subject: Curing spam I note that a lot of posters have a variety of ideas on how to cure spam. These posters suggest that "they" (without defining who "they" are) should be doing "some bright idea" or that the Internet email system should be changed so that "something different is done". I wonder how many are aware of how all our Internet systems came into being? Anyone is free to propose whatever standard they feel would be good and, if the Internet community finds it good, it will end up being adopted. (Some RFC proposals are so good that they are even adopted by the Internet community even before they are declared to be a "standard".) One of the big problems with the outfits (like SpamCop) that create blacklists used by some sites to attempt to block SPAM are that they are operating outside of the rules - in essence they are vigilante operations that can severly interfere with the proper operation of the Internet. If they worked within the rules (i.e. created RFCs to spell out their methods), they would not be a big problem because we could make sure our email systems knew how to work with them. For something to become a "standard", it must first be submitted as an "RFC" (Request For Comments). For example, our email systems use SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol), started out as RFC0772 dated September 1980, replaced by RFC0780 dated May 1981, replaced by RFC0788 dated November 1981, replaced by RFC0821 dated August 1982 (this version became a standard), again replaced by RFC2821 dated April 2001, which is a proposed standard. So basically, at present, our email systems are based on a standard that is over 2 decades old (although there are some RFCs that add some modifications here and there). My basic message here is relatively simple. If you have a super idea about how something should be done on the Internet (like how to control / prevent SPAM), follow the rules to get the message out - submit it as an Internet Draft to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), a large open international community of network designers, operators, vendors, and researchers concerned with the evolution of the Internet architecture and the smooth operation of the Internet. It is open to any interested individual. All the information you need can be found at their site - http://www.ietf.org/home.html. Also, have a look at the RFC Editor site - http://www.rfc-editor.org/ - where you can do keyword searchs to see what RFCs already exist. By the way, the Internet Standards Process itself is contain in an RFC - see http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2026.txt for details. With reference specifically to SPAM, a simple search using the keyword "email" returns 52 references, the latest offering being RFC3865 dated September 2004, titled "A No Soliciting Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) Service Extension", a proposed standard that is basically the submitter's idea of a way to control SPAM. Take a look, become part of the IETF, and make you comments to them. Tom Aman Aman Software http://www.cyberspyder.com ==== BILLBOARD =================================== From: Steven Rothberg Subject: PodCasting Our career site, CollegeRecruiter.com, is primarily used by college students and recent graduates. Our business model is much like the traditional newspaper help wanted classifieds in that employers pay to post (advertise) their job openings and the candidates apply to the advertised positions. As a result, traffic for us is important even if it only indirectly leads to increased revenues. I'm interested in increasing our traffic through the use of PodCasting some employment-related content. Pros? Cons? Suggestions? Warnings? Steven Rothberg The Highest Traffic Job Board for Students & Grads http://www.collegerecruiter.com Steven, CollegeRecruiter.com ------- new post - new topic ------- From: Mike Banks Valentine Subject: MSN > I am still not seeing much traffic from MSN, so people need > to be mindful that the three major search services (Google, > Yahoo!, MSN) represent different kinds of markets. - Michael Martinez, LED 1938 I've been pouring over web stats for a half dozen clients looking for traffic from MSN and it is missing in action. Even though these sites rank well for targeted terms for my clients - MSN is not delivering the traffic at all. This has always been an issue for SEO's and their clients and we are puzzling this one over, looking for results from those top rankings at both Yahoo and MSN as they seem to retain the searchers no matter how well we rank the sites! Yahoo has dropped dramatically, with referred traffic that used to amount to over 5% of the visitors to client sites, it has dropped as low as 1.5% of total referred traffic from search engines. After a recent increase in referred traffic from Yahoo search, we were hopeful it would stay high, but it wasn't to be. Rankings haven't declined, just the referred traffic! Google has gone up in referrals from foreign countries, including foreign language sites. We used to see tiny amounts of traffic trickle in from non-English language countries, but Netherlands, Germany, Italy, France, Spain, Mexico and a dozen other countries have combined to send more non-English referred traffic than the total coming from (English) Yahoo Search! The search world is getting very odd when great rankings at Yahoo and MSN don't equal referred traffic. This has always been the case to a degree, but is getting extreme and very disturbing. Google has always sent more traffic, with as much as 85% of referred search traffic coming from English Speaking Google variants in Canada, India, New Zealand, Australia, and UK sending more traffic than the US Yahoo or MSN. What is the value of top rankings in MSN and Yahoo if those top positions don't bring traffic? Mike Banks Valentine Ethical Search Engine Optimization Specialist http://www.seoptimism.com/ ------------------------------------------------------- The LED Digest is sponsored by pair Networks: pair.com for Hosting | pairNIC.com for Domains © Copyright 1995-2005 Orange Wheel, LLC. All Rights Reserved. ----------------------------------------------------------------- "As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy." - Abraham Lincoln |
