Freedbacking

WebWorkerDaily (which I read and love for the inspiration it gives to tech nomads) has an article today about how Zoho is offering an offline mode for document editing and how this is great and how it's lame that Google docs doesn't have this feature.

I started to leave a comment for them but 1) their comment system ate my comment and 2) I wanted to make a picture to explain my point which I can't insert into their comments.

Complexity of Medium and Value in Editing On The Web

This feels pretty intuitive to me, but apparently it's not that intuitive since Zoho didn't figure it out (and they're smart).

So, at the top left are situations like basic email, basic text editing. Think about your 10 year old kid writing a paper for school. If she uses Microsoft Word to do that it's a waste of time and money. No one will argue the money aspect, but online document editing will be faster in terms of his time since it is simpler to learn and do what she needs.

In the middle imagine something like a spreadsheet for keeping track of your expenses or for adding up and assigning costs on a trip among a group of friends. If you use an online spreadsheet anyone can add to it and you get the sharing benefits. However, if you're a spreadsheet jockey it's tedious to use the online editors and you are prohibited from more complex capabilities built into desktop applications (monte carlo analysis? macros?).

The Enthusiast Group is an exciting company built around providing social networking and citizen media platforms for passionate folks. For nearly 2 years now they've been building sites to support communities around adrenaline sports (YourMtb.com, YourClimbing.com, YourHorseSports.com, YourCycling.com, YourRunning.com). This has given them great experience in the world of social networks and user-generated-content (citizen journalism) including some relatively novel uses like Grassroots coverage of major events.

According to their blog, Google Reader now searches. Brilliant idea!

Note that I had this idea almost a year ago (my post on searching google reader). More great tips are available for a variety of companies on the old freedbacking link. Ideas like improvements for Google Documents for example.

Note to my readers: give this a shot yourself and be sure to use the freedbacking tag as suggested by Chris Pirillo.

Michael Gray has already schooled you once, and this is largely a re-hash of that idea, with an update for your ninjopoly fun.

Ninjopoly - Make Sure Your Campaign Itself is Compelling

I just stopped by the old Ask a Ninja about Net Neutrality and at the end there is a "Sponsored by ask.com - go search ask.com about ninjopoly" and if you do that...you get nothing. A whole bucket of nothing. So, you paid to get that word added to his movie, and then people search on it, and the find the ask a ninja page and a keyword stuffed page. Yay. That's not going to get those new visitors to come back. If you had something awesome there I might become an ask.com user, but as it is, it turned me off so hard I'm ranting about it! Hardly the goal of your campaign, right?

Ninjopoly - Make Sure Search Campaigns Can't be Gamed

There have been a few marketing campaigns recently that instructed users to, for example, "google for pontiac" and now "search ask.com for ninjopoly". These campaigns can be great, people love a a surprising result for a search. Do not enter into this strategy lightly! There are search engine optimizers out there who will piggy back on your campaign or use PPC to get their advertising at the top of the page if you don't already own that spot. Be prepared for that situation by cementing your control of the SERP and PPC prior to launching your campaign. Especially for a word like ninjopoly that is completely made up it is totally simple to control the SERPS if you have advanced knowledge of the campaign...

I just tabulated (and published) our history of bills from Xcel Energy for the last 12 months. I used google spreadsheets just to try it out and it's pretty neat. The "publish" feature makes it easy to share the thing, the I wish it would also give a "download in ODS, XLS, RTF, CSV format" link.

A couple interesting things to note:

1. We have a gas meter in our basement and Xcel checks it every year (or so) and then makes estimates based upon previous usage and current weather. So, we moved into this house 2.8 years ago. In that time they only came to read the meter once. Our usage is a bit less than the previous tenants (we use a schedule on our thermostat and don't have any kids) so this usage reflects a mix of their habits and our habits and the estimate.
2. Electricity is under a similar deal in terms of usage and estimates
3. Xcel offers a program called wind source (linked to my previous posts) that costs a little more (about $5/month for us) so our rates are a little different than most

Dear Google,

I'm writing to remind you that you are a search company. You make the computer do stuff for me because my time is more valuable than the time of your server-farm-borg. I was looking for this which I get in my feed of cvs commits but I couldn't find it. Finding stuff is your job, ok. So, please start keep doing it in all of your products.

Thanks, you're the bestest!
Greg