Page Rank 0 to 4 in Four Months

Wouldn’t it be great if you could get feedback not only on the content that you submit, but on the way you submit it? Maybe your angle is all wrong, or you misspelled the title, or any number of things? It could be useful for veterans as well as noobs. Have an idea for a press release, or a submission to slashdot, but want to try a few different angles? You could experiment with posting different titles, and bodies and have users rank and give feedback, with the focus less on the content, and more on the presentation.

Then when content is ready they can post to social sites (reddit, buzz, fark, etc.) through our site, and we can track who gets the most diggs/upvotes/etc. So you can see from start to finish what worked and what didn’t. Think of it a s a social media sandbox, a place to pitch your ideas before you pitch to the world. What do you think?

Known Implementations:

• Limited feedback can already be gained from comments from the posting sites themselves, though they aren’t always helpful, and rarely focus on how to better present the submission.
• PR professionals, and other pay for marketing consultants
• Various forums http://groups.google.com/group/Interactive-PR?lnk=gschg&pli=1 online, though most are not very helpful, and are filled with spam and people only interested in self promotion

Biggest Hurdles:

• Link spam, and self promotion would dominate the site initially, unless enough incentives are given to users, maybe users above a certain rank will get their links posted without nofollow…
• Is the idea too specific or is it too general? Can others do achieve the same result with another service, or no service? How does one market to the marketing community?

Seriously.

We could easily implement a 200 year change over plan. So when something has to be replaced it is replaced either with metric, or with a combination metric and english units. The next time it gets replaced it has to be metric. One world one set of standard units. VIVA la revolution!!

Most people on this planet have dreams, ambitions, but don’t have very clear goals. Saying “I want to be a millionaire” is a little different from saying: “I want to have a million dollar stake in a corporation in the next five years”. Once we have a clear goal, we can divide and conquer.

Maybe a million dollars is a bit much to bite off right now, so lets do something most adults want to do, “lose weight “. Does that mean tomorrow, next week, next year, or when? Does that mean one pound or fifty? That goal doesn’t really help answer any of those questions so we revise our goal: “Loose 10 pounds by next year” this isn’t a very technical problem, but we can troubleshoot it just the same. Lets take a look a how we can help use our goal to break up the problem

First Break it down:

Need to lose 10 lbs in a year? We’ll it turns out that’s 0.83 lbs per month, or 0.026 lbs per day roughly, thats doable .

Set milestones:

Take those sub steps and make milestones, to ensure that everything is  on track.

Get More Data:

How can we be sure we’ve met the milestones without some metrics? In this case a bathroom-scale seems reasonable. Maybe we want to take some photographic evidence of changes…just make sure the data fits the goal. If we want add extra data, we can add extra goals. If we get a tape measure then another related goal could be “lose one inch from the waist in a year”

Normalize Milestones:

So 0.026 lbs per day sounds like a good milestone right? We go out, buy a scale and then realize that the data is horribly wild. Seemingly random weight losses or gains per day don’t make any sense. So that’s not a good measure of success, so ignore the static and wait for a month to go by.

Normalize Data Collection Methods:

Okay so a month goes by, and  we still have crazy data…if we measure weight today, we see a gain of 3 lbs for the month, and if we take a measurement yesterday, it seems like we lost 3 lbs for the months.  So there needs to be  a way to smooth out the data a little. Since a glass of water can change someones weight on a very sensitive scale, it is decided to weight take a measurement the same time every day. Right after we wake up, the data starts smooth out quite a bit, but its still not quite where it needs to be.

Normalize Data:

Take an average of all of the data. In this situation especially we are looking for trends over a large period of time, so don’t get hung up on individual data points.

Profit (? ):

So now that we’ve got our end goal, milestones, and data collection methods all defined we are good to go, right?

Well those steps alone aren’t enough to ensure our solutions success in this scenario. If we are still not losing weight we need to go back to our milestones and break those down. How many calories does it take to lose a 0.023 lbs? Set that as a new milestone to either give up that many calories per day, or to burn off that many calories.

Once we’ve set our new milestone, get the data…normalize…and repeat.

Even when we do all these steps, sometimes we fail to achieve our goals. This doesn’t mean that the technique failed, it means we failed defining our problem and breaking it into manageable pieces. A little harsh I know, but if we don’t have failure to motivate us, then what is there?

Don’t get hung up in the details of the weight loss example, its just an example…these troubleshooting steps are good for everything. We have to meet our milestones to meet our goals. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and it took Edison over a 1000 attempts to make a commercially viable light bulb. Start with a clear vision of the finish line, and as long as we take each step along the way without falling, then we can’t fail!

This is part of Richard’s series How To Troubleshoot Everything. He used this specific technique to lose 30 pounds in 4 months. He currently works for programs web things such as WhySpam.Me, a disposable free email tool.

If you’ve got 30 minutes to spare, its well worth it:

What exactly is that, you might ask? Well all activities have conditions that make them better or worse, the most obvious is the weather…you probably wouldn’t go swimming in the Atlantic in canada in january. But there are other datapoints as well, such as recommendations, traffic predictions, netflix recommendations etc.
I would like a very clean simple to use interface where users keep lists of activities they want to do, and plan trips using collaboration tools. For instance, I could list that I am interested in symphonies, wakeboarding, and roller derbies.  And when one of those events was coming up, I could get a reminder email listing off upcoming events for the week/month. I could synch artists from iTunes, and check to see if any concerts nearby are featuring artists that you listen to. And events would have pertinent data, weather information, traffic predictions (especially when competing large events are occuring at the same time in a close proximity), and tips and feedback from members who have been to the event before “make sure to bring a blanket!”.

In addition to large events, you could even add your own small road trips, and general activities. Like wind surfing, but want the weather to be over 70 degrees for a consecutive month first? Great, we’ll let you know when the water’s good!  So if you were stuck on what to do, you can focus on what you would like to do, instead of having to micromanage a whole lot of extra data.

You could plan other minor events, such as going to movies, dinners, or board games. You can leave yourself reminders of what works and what doesn’t “send out invites no later than one week before” with additional community tips. The end goal would be to make the service so useful, that the user wouldn’t want to plan anything without it. We could link into twitter, facebook and a variety of other social networks to coordinate communications and invites, and synch to calendars. Synch with netflix rankings to recommend movies in theaters.

Money would come from sponsored ads from activity planners, similar to mint.com’s mantra, we would want all ads to be targeted specifically to be helpful to users. It would take alot of tweaking to get right, but I think would be very useful.

Current competition:

Yelp – Has a good fanbase, and lots of reviews, not necessarily activity focused, but that may come in the future.

Hype Machine – Concert recommendations

Eventful – Looks like the serve as a directory for local events, don’t know what type of planning they have, you can subscribe to rss feeds.

Yes I know i should import more often than once a year, but things just didn’t work out that way so here we are…

After importing a years worth of photos, confirming they were all in iPhoto and then selecting to clear my full camera (after they’re in iPhoto i take a backup with time machine, so its normally a pretty safe bet). I was not pleasantly surpised to find this lovely dialog box greeting me the next time i tried to open iPhoto.

All my other pictures show up correctly, but not my last YEARS worth of pictures!!!!

I’ve contacted apple and await a callback, i’m crossing my fingers that we can remedy this situation some how. I’ll let you know how it goes.

Update: looks like its only about 4 months, but thats still quite a while. And no apple has not been able to help yet.

Pick some keywords you think describe your problem and make a search. Open a few promising links.  If you don’t find any relevant information then search again. If get unrelated information try eliminating generic terms, and adding specific terms, such as brand names, product types, or program names. Searching “error 12″ won’t be nearly as effective as searching “error 12 quicktime windows xp” is much more specific.
Don’t forget synonyms and acronyms, if a user posts a question on a forum they may ask about their “chevy” or their “chevrolet”. Forum’s are especially helpful because not only will they provide valuable information, you can see how others have been troubleshooting that problem.

Sometimes these searches will solve your problem, but more often than not, they will only get you 90% of the way there. So slow down, and rather than looking for a “solution” look for information, read methods and collect facts, not opinions. Lastly don’t forget to check for a date on any forums or documents, nothing is worse spending an hour implementing a “fix” only to realize that it is inaccurate and out of date.

The Recap:

• Be as detailed in your search as possible
• Search, and search again
• Try different search terms…Synonyms, and Acronyms
• Look for information, not just “solutions”

This post is part of my Series: How To Troubleshoot Everything

That being said, I would like to start talking about some lessons learned from answering calls from NASA, ratheon, boeing, and the like and  the nature of problem solving and troubleshooting in general. It would be really easy for me to be a whiney complainer-bot who rips on “newbs”, but I’m going to limit my anecdotes and focus on the core of the issue, getting problems solved.

Problem solving, is an art. If you apply the right technique at the right time, you don’t even have to know that much about the product you’re supporting and its a topic that not many people give much thought about. Problem solving is supposed to come “naturally” and just happen. And as an intelligent person will tell you, that common sense is more often than not, not very common.

So stay tuned for my ramblings, I’ll try to condense them down and post them here in the days and weeks to come. Just keep in mind there is no magic formula to solving a problem, but if you ask the right question, you’ll get the right answer.

Troubleshooting Steps:

1. Google It !

Troubleshooting Techniques:

1. How to Start from the Finish

If you haven’t already done so check out their awesome video and If you want to know how to build your own, then head over to their How We Did It section.

Vroom Vroom!!