A few things:
- Apology 1: I didn’t realize that editing an entry causes RSS feeders to send the entry again. As you RSS subscribers know, I make a lot of changes to my entries, so you’re getting multiple copies of the same entry as I tweak it. Unfortunately, it’s unlikely I’ll stop tweaking. I think of my blog like a web page that I can change all the time. I wasn’t aware that I’m causing you to get entries over and over.
- Apology 2: I’m just figuring out how Typepad and Ecto work together. It’s been an educational experience in font wars and templates. To put it mildly, I was feeling around in the dark.
- If anyone knows of a counter that I can put on my blog that shows a running count of visits for the day and then resets each day to 0, please let me know. After a while, a cumulative counter gets boring. I have a counter where I see the daily stats, but I’d like to put one on the blog for everyone to see.
- If you want me to cover a topic, please leave a comment in one of the postings. I read just about every comment.
Thanks for reading my blog!
Guy
hey Guy!
I guess the good thing about the RSS updates is that you’re getting extra advertising and reach for this blog :D
I’ve been hearing that a lot of people have been having numerous problems with Typepad… you should move over to WordPress!
I too am in the process of getting my blog and another blog up and running… although I doubt I’ll get the same number of subscribed readers in such a short time as you have done. I guess it helps to be famous and have great books out before launching a blog :)
Keep up the good work.
cheers
Nathan Waters
Hi Guy,
statcounter.com is a good tool for your daily stat counts. To add it to TypePad, stick the code into one of your sidebar modules.
Another one is measuremap.com but it’s an invite only beta so you’ll need to knock on the door first.
Love the blog posts, you’ve got a great voice for the medium. Keep up the good work!
Good to see a legend finally blog, you’re well known in the Seattle area. Keep up the good work.
If it’s not necessary to show the visit counts on the page itself, I think measuremap.com will tell you a lot about your visitors. Getting it to work with TypePad should be trivial.
No advice on basic hit counters, but if you are willing to wait a bit and want crazy detailed reports, try Google Analytics ( http://www.google/analytics/ ), if you haven’t already.
Hey Guy — Rest assured that not every RSS reader is picking up every blip. I’m only seeing one of each reading your feed through Safari (like a good Mac boy). Although now maybe I should be wondering if I’m missing your revised wisdom!
I’m using Statcounter–it’s the one on the site. I can’t find where I can put up daily counts with Statcounter, though.
Thanks,
Guy
Visit counts aren’t as interesting as how many Technorati inbound links you have or how many times you’ve been bookmarked on del.icio.us, IMHO.
Google Analytics, as suggested by another commenter, might be more fun, too. It gives you nice maps and all.
Our whole team is glad to have you on TypePad, Guy, especially since now I think you’ll be able to focus on what you have to say, instead of messing with the technology and tools. I know Adriaan is happy to have you using Ecto, too — they’re a great combination.
Congratulations on the blogging effort. You certainly are another writer that I read avidly.
I can’t speak for everyone, but I would love to hear about things you have learned in past lives. Anything from how you started new ventures to what you learned about dealing with people.
Stay passionate, keep up the good work.
Robert
Late adopter blogger? You’re not late — my mom doesn’t have a blog yet. :-)
Seriously, though. Oh, and there’s been plenty of discussion about how to amend a post. The general consensus is to update the original post, rather than posting a correction in a different article. Given that, I think people can expect to see updates. If you can you might want to make them obvious, like a bold “Update:” at the bottom or something, so people don’t have to wonder what changed or why they’re seeing duplicates.
Here’s a question for you: will there ever be a reprint of “The Macintosh Way?” I want my team to read it, but I’m also excessively possessive about my copy… :-)
Thanks dude!
Excuse me for the broken link – http://www.google.com/analytics/
Hi Guy,
Great Blog.
I would like to hear your views on LUCK factor required for an entrepreneur.
Thanks,
VeerJain.
Never mind the problems Guy… theres always a learning curve.
Mine is to try to get rid of Trackbacks and Backlinks ( I just cant seem to get the logic of doing it ) ;)
— click on my name for a short blog on the topic —
Ray
You are very welcome to the world of blogging. I hope it’s as enjoyable to you as it is to me.
Keep up the GREAT work!
It was suggested, quite a long time ago, that bloggers should refrain frome changing their posts so as to adhere to good standards of journalism (e.g. #4 at http://rebeccablood.net/handbook/excerpts/weblog_ethics.html). Even for small edits. In an ideal world bloging platforms might provide a revsion history. FYI not all aggregators create a new entry but most will flag it as new or updated, but it’s not a big deal.
I’m suprised by the number of mentions for Google Analyitics, I’d instead suggest trying Measure Map (http://measuremap.com/). It gives you a simple synopsis and allows dynamic calendar filtering using some nifty sliders.
I track hundreds of blogs via Bloglines, and rest assured you’re not the only one who tweaks posts repeatedly. If I chose to, I could set Bloglines to recognize each post as “new” only the first time it appears, but I’d rather see updated posts. If I don’t think they’re different enough to warrant another read, I can just bleep right over ’em. ;-)
Its great to know that you read the comments, its for me a pleasure to keep reading you, I do it since the book: How to Drive Your Competition Crazy: Creating Disruption for Fun and Profit, and yes I would like to have more of that kind of advices in your blog.
Regards,
Give www.mybloglog.com a try. It has some interesting features that the others do not, like realtime tracking by outbound link.
– Andrew
www.egoventures.com
I’ve had excellent feedback from clients since installing Mint (http://www.haveamint.com ) on the sites we manage.
It provides realtime statistics (as opposed to most packages which are based on log files and compiled daily) and is an open platform with a whole whack of add-on modules that have been created by third party developers.
Let me know if you want to check it out and I’ll give you a login for one of my accounts.
Guy, we’ve all been through the same learning curve, and any mistakes that you may have made are very minor. Your book, The Art of the Start, is my business bible and helps me to educate my clients – thanks.
You may want to check out MapStats (http://mapstats.blogflux.com/) as your daily meter.
You’re doing just fine.
Your RSS2 feed has GUIDs (they are optional in RSS2). Your Atom feed inevitably has entry IDs (Atom requires them). Aggregators have plenty of basis on which to detect that edited entries are not new. And these provisions have been around for years, so aggregator developers have had plenty of time to incorporate support for them.
I don’t think you need to restrain yourself in any fashion.
I use Google Analytics (but you need a gmail account, and an invitation to sign up. Also Measure map. MM would give you a daily hit count, but you have to go to another web page to see it.
Guy, a multiple choice test for you.
You have 4% of the PC market with tight margins and massive competition. You’ve got a cool OS with development costs sunk, strong gross profit, differentiation from your (limited field of) competitors, massive barriers to other entrants and good branding. One day your R&D lab calls to say you can sell your OS to an addressable market of 200M a year with a profit margin that makes you weep ….
You:
A. Keep doing what you are doing because even though everyone else will get faster chips as well, you can beat them with better quality hardware.
2. Engage head hunters to hire a new CEO and guide the company to next phase of growth. Someone who understands the living room, perhaps the guy doing Windows Media Centre ..?
3. Lull your enemies further into complacency by telling them your OS will never run on other hardware, while secretly you plan ….
What would you plan to do Guy?
Ok, not that I think you’ll be short of blog topics, but here is another I’d like to hear you on. When should founders let go, and when should they persist? Would Steve Jobs have succeeded to this extent if he hadn’t “left” in 1985?
All the best, keep on writing :)
Guy,
You might be interested in reading, if you don’t already, Kevin Sheridan’s blog: CultureHack. Kevin is a professional writer, has an impish affinity for all things: Mac, Aquaminds NoteTaker, Ecto, TypePad, and Applescript; plus, a love for expanding on the interwingledness of all of them.
Best,
Chris
OK. Got it, no html.
Here is the link for Sheridan’s Blog: CultureHack (http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2006/01/the_education_o.html#comment-12934125)
Chris (again)
Oh, crap,
Wrong URL. Here is Sheridan’s:
http://culturehack.typepad.com/notetakerblogging/
Apologies,
Chris
Guy, check out http://www.feedburner.com/ You can add all sorts of stuff to your feeds. Check out the link on that page for Publishers and Podcasters, then Stats.
Blogs are not traditional journalism, and many of us (even when “we” have a journalism education) wish that more places would updated articles in situ. Revision histories are best, so that a specific revision can be quoted in another article or paper, but the default should always be recent and up-to-date.
Good aggregators will show the changes as they happened and maintain such a history for the reader (to some extent), although most could benefit from better revisioning.
Please don’t change to posting and then posting corrections (except maybe to note that you have corrected something, to benefit those with incapable readers, or readers via the regular old WWW.)!
Guy,
As for topics of blogging…
In grad school, I took a course from one of your contemporaries at Apple who was there during release and production of the first Mac. One of my favorite stories was about (without getting deep in to the details) how Apple was brokering gigs with universities, which were wreaking havoc on your production line.
I’d love some kind of post on how product managers can better interface with operations. This is a huge deal in my world right now, as my little company recently booked some serious orders with a single client, but now we’re running a steady stream of fire drills to make it happen.
Your thoughts on the interplay between evangelism and actually delivering the miracles from the marketing side of things would be like the stone tablets for me.
But regardless, thank you so much for blogging. And I get you via Bloglines, and seeing updates is no big deal. If it’s important, I’ll read it, if not, I won’t.
I’m new myself. It does get confusing, doesn’t it?
“you’re getting multiple copies of the same entry as I tweak it.”
If its OK, to read the tweaks. :-)
you asked for topics to blog on… as a christian, i’d love to hear how your faith works into your work. thanks for being open about that in other venues…
Guy:
Given that you seem prone to lists – can you put together a list of before-their-time ideas. By this, I mean ideas that were brilliant, correct and simply failed because of some orthogonal reasons?
-av
1. Showing duplicate blog entries while editing Comments is the results of a bad RSS reader..
2. Havent done this
3. Use a Web analytics software.. (e.g using google analytics, omniture etc.. you can paste some javascript to your page, that will upload stats to their DB and you can then login to their site to see the data over time..)
Love the blog, Guy. And don’t worry about the RSS stuff. Everybody’s a newbie at something at one point or another.
For blog stats, I’d recommend BlogBeat (http://www.blogbeat.net) Very clean and simple UI and it’s geared specifically for blogs. I’ve been using it for months now and I love it.
The first thing I want to say is I’m a huge fan!
Ok now that that’s out of the way I just want to say that Google Analytics is one of the best out there, but as my marketing experience comes to mind it’s generally not seen as a good thing to put a counter on a page for the following 3 reasons!
1) Very “retro” seen as thing “we” used to do in the 90’s
2)Perception is everything I’ve seen great pages out there with only a few loyal visitors, so the page count will be low, so “newbie’s” that find the page dismiss it as “well if this guy knew what he was talking about more people would be reading this page”
3)Your page is growing everyday with more and more people, and sometimes it’s a bad thing when people see that everyone goes to the page they might stop going (i.e. when everyone has that red sports car its just not the same anymore)
Anyways just some ideas!!
Can’t wait for more future posts!
Greg M!
In terms of blog subjects, I’d love your thoughts on how to identify competition and define a market for new products or services. I agree that it’s clueless to imply you have no competition; however, in fairness, it can be hard to clearly identify your competition when you’re offering something quite different than the status quo. One example is SeniorNet, from way back in “Selling the Dream” – they didn’t have any direct competition in terms of empowering seniors through technology, but they did have indirect competition from people trying to empower seniors in other ways (sports and rec leagues) – you could even argue that TV is indirect competition for them, since it’s so easy to stay home and watch. So how far do you dig if your competition is indirect? And how would SeniorNet, with no direct competition, prove their market to funders?
Brett
MyBlogLog.com is a cool tool.
Would love to see how to apply the evangelism to not-for-profits groups…I have some sort of an idea of how to go about it, but am not totally in focus in creating a plan as it were.
Thanks Guy!
I’ll echo the first comment and say that if you have any thoughts on the non-profit world I’d love to read them. I’ve only recently subscribed, so my apologies if this is a more well-worn topic here than I can tell.
In particular, I’d love to read your thoughts on trail-blazing with new tech for non-profits. I work with Tech Soup’s Net Squared http://netsquared.org where we are bringing together tech companies and early adopters to support non-profits. Many NPO folks could use help with talking points to gain support from upper management for using new web tools like blogs and RSS.
While I’d love to read here your thoughts on that, do let me know if you’d be up for an interview on the topic. I’ve recently interviewed Barb Dybwad from Weblogs Inc. (http://netsquared.org/barb ), Mark Cuban (http://netsquared.org/cuban ) and Search Engine Watch’s Gary Price (http://netsquared.org/price )
Let me know if you’re up for sharing your thoughts in that context.
-Marshall
Once upon a time you had a mail list for fathers. 1) do you still have that mail list? 2) you have some incredible insights into parenting and raising kids. Maybe you could blog some of your experiences as a dad?
Aloha
How about the advantages/disadvantages and general desireability from a VC perspective of a new category product vs. the better mousetrap technology.
hey Guy, could you not have names be direct email address links, trawling spiders really don’t have a problem harvesting them and while I like blue frog, I don’t want yet more spam. If you convert the name into a JPG or something similar, that’ll help.
“Apology 1: I didn’t realize that editing an entry causes RSS feeders to send the entry again. As you RSS subscribers know, I make a lot of changes to my entries, so you’re getting multiple copies of the same entry as I tweak it. ”
No worries, I just see that it is the same entry, flick through, and go on. Pointer: If I am called away from a post I am working on, I save it in draft.
Marketing and public benefit corporations (“not-for-profits”)–I was scolded this summer by one of my organizations for referring to myself publicly as “evangelist for [insert name here]”–management thought it was a religious reference. The “providing services” sector has an anti-marketing bias, or an antiquated view of what marketing should be, IMAO.
Happily, I was able to pass on your post re branding. It lead to a productive conversation and perhaps some movement in a positive direction.
Nathan said, “I’ve been hearing that a lot of people have been having numerous problems with Typepad… you should move over to WordPress!”–Well, Typepad has been exceptionally stable and reliable for me, as I work on the 2,500th post.
i was getting around to asking you to please stop doing that. well.. u made it clear u’r not ever going to. what can i say? u’r absolutely right (not to mention entitled) to tweak like crazy. they’re ur thoughts. of course u knew that. just going for teachers’ pet. please let me know if the position is already taken so i can stop reaching.
on the other hand… if u change it, u fake it (of course the outcome is better. but not genuine). and, even worse… i doubt that any of the eaters (being fed) are looking around for the small adjustments.
my cents: either u distictly show what u modified in the post, or… keep the post u’r changing for a few days in the oven. when it’s baked, serve it. can’t go wrong.
Apology 1: i don’t have time to read all the comments to check if i’m just rephrasing.
Apology 2: if i come off as being arogant (and i’m not saying i am)… sorry. can’t help it. long boring story.
Guy, while the business “stuff” is unique and powerful, so is the personal “stuff” like Hindsights. I find it inspirational when people are honest about their struggles along the way, it is an affirmation of our humanity and powerful it its own right, even to the bottom line!
Hi Guy,
First thanks for being such an inspiration to entrepreneurs, your devotion to helping those chasing dreams and growing companies is much appreciated.
I would like to hear your thoughts on VoIP as it relates to developing countries and emerging markets where there are entrenched state-backed telecom monopolies and, in some cases, pending legislation to make VoIP illegal.
My company, TalkFree capitalizes on the demand for a cheaper alternative for those in developing countries to palce calls. We enable private label resellers to grow businesses and have noticed some interesting trends in the space.
Best,
Jesse Krieger
…
I commit the same first mistake. I re-edit several times some entries or, sometimes, I get doubled entries, so I think I annoy my subscribers (if any; I don´t really know how many are they.)
Any clue about counting my subscribers?
Guy,
Great blog. I found it today and am enjoying the read.
I set up my own firm’s blog last month and have also continued to tweak my posts after publishing. I wondered if this would cause RSS problems, and now I see that it can.
My solution is to try to limit tweaks as much as possible by self-editing initially, but I won’t shy away from it if something needs to be improved.
I’m a PR guy, so I think the power of well-crafted posts trumps the potential inconvenience of duplicate RSS items.
But that’s just me!
Hi Guy!
You’re doing great so far, so not to worry. I know what you mean about going back to posts and tweaking. I often go back and fix typos or add a little tidbit here or there. I try not to go back and change but sometimes I can’t help myself.
Since I just wrote my first book last fall I’ve learned there’s a big difference between writing for a blog and writing for a book or magazine. Maybe your “book writing” bias is driving your need to go back and edit, polish, tweak, etc. You might find this diminishes over time as you blog more. Or not!
Last thing – thanks for the Ecto reference. I just got it setup and I love it. With my clumsy fingers, having the spellchecker is a blessing!
Thanks for the fine blog. Keep it rolling!
Kevin Stirtz
A big fan, love your books, they strike straight to my entrepreneurial heart.
You asked for topics, so here goes;
How about some top tens (always good to get comments started)?
– Top innovation trends to watch out for
– Top movers and shakers (could be companies, could be people)
– Top innovations of 2005
Other topics
-When to quit (a business, developing an innovation, etc)
-When is a product a fad and when is it the future?
-How big a market is big enough?
-How much company ownership to give and to whom? (VC’s get x% first round, etc)
-When to sell your company?
-How big a team to acquire and at what stages?
-Best Bootstrapping Tips…
If you’re ever at a loss for topics, let us know. We have a few zillion more you can cover.
Greetings. Found you via a del.icio.us link.
1) RSS aggregators will pick up on any changes made to any entry, regardless of how small. If you simply load the entry, make NO changes, and save it again, it will be sent again.
As for the blog as a web page, yes, it is. If you’re not blogging for money, go hog wild, just keep it readable for us ;) (If you’re blogging for money, there’s a whole school of thought on when enough tinkering is enough. Personally, I’ve been blogging since 1996, and haven’t stopped tinkering, yet.)
2) (I don’t know TypePad, and am currently learning Ecto)
3) Don’t know about a daily visits counter, like that, but there are several great free statistics packages that show you the number of visits per day. Both in unique visits, and total page loads. The one that would probably fit you best, as this juncture, is SiteMeter. It’s free, but requires a small (20×20) graphic to be displayed on your website. You can place this graphic anywhere in your template you want. They provide instructions for doing so with TypePad.
4) Hmm, suggestions. Since I have no idea what you’re covering in your blog, having only just come to this entry, I’ll make the same suggestion I make to every new blogger: Write what you’re passionate about. If you start writing something, and find yourself bored about it, pick another topic.
-Eric Scalf (Author of MindFyre: Amateur Blogging since 1999) (by the by, a little HTML allowance in the comments (such as italics, and bolding) is a good thing, IMHO)
Guy, Welcome to the Blogosphere. You might be interested in a free alternative to Ecto for posting … Qumana. Our new (but very solid) v3 beta works on both Macs and PCs now.
http://www.qumana.com/index.htm
Feel free to ping me if you have any questions.
I’d also recommend all the services at FeedBurner … FeedBlitz for E-mail and FeedFlare add ons are especially cool.