Martin Gordon's Blog

The official Nintendo Revolution website has announced that official name of the Revolution will be Wii. While I think Revolution was a cool enough name (and the abbreviation RS nicely watched the DS), and aside from all the PS/XBox fanboys making wii-wii jokes, it is an alright name. Nintendo has gone out on a limb with the focus (originality over graphics) and the controller and the name is just a reflection of this.

One thing is for sure: the Google Juice will be strong with this one. Since 'Wii' is not a real word, even just a little press will jump Nintendo's 'Wii' straight to the top of search results. Compare this to 'Revolution' which would have to compete with the American Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, et al for Google pole position.

Update: Chris Kohler at Wired posted a more in-depth defense of the 'Wii' name. He basically argues that Wii doesn't sound anything like a video game, and that's what Nintendo is trying to do with the system – make it like no other video game system ever.

Technorati Tags: Google Juice, Nintendo, Revolution, Wii, gaming, XBox, Playstation, names, rename, marketing, video games, search

TechCrunch reports that Yahoo is testing a new home page. It won't do them any good. It's still too cluttered. Even MSN Search (and Ask.com, too) got that one right. Not only that, but the old site compartmentalized content a lot better than this new one.

Seth Godin said it best at his talk at Google. The techies send non-techies to Google because they'll know what to do and won't come back to bother you.

If Yahoo is going after Google, they should stick with an uncluttered site for everyone and let My Yahoo! users make their personalized pages as cluttered as they want. If they're not going after Google anymore, well, then they should probably let the world know.

Technorati Tags: Yahoo, Google, MSN, Ask.com, search, redesign, design, marketing, portal

Remember that iPod packaging designed by Microsoft video that was going around a few weeks ago? The iPod Observer reports that the video actually came from inside the company. The video was made to point out the challenges Microsoft faces regarding their packaging and design aesthetic.

We all know the first step to recovery is knowing you have a problem. Good for Microsoft. I wonder if we'll see simpler, more refined Vista packaging or if they'll play it safe and boring again.

Technorati Tags: Microsoft, packaging, Apple, iPod, funny, humor, video, marketing, design

After having the 4 P's of traditional marketing drilled into me last semester in MKTG 101, it's cool to see that Steve Rubel has come up with the 4 P's of blog marketing.

Let's take a look:

Passionate - Write about issues that are near and dear to your heart
Purposeful - Make sure you keep the end in mind; why are you blogging?
Present - Keep an eye on what's topical today
Positional - Take a stand on an issue and follow it

Mike Sansone also adds

Participate - Share what you learn with others

How do they stack up within the traditional 4 P framework?

At first, it seems that the blog itself is the product and all five of the new P's fall under product. I think we can bend things around and fit multiple things into the old model.

Product - By being passionate, you give people a reason to visit your blog. Your products are your thoughts and you put out no better products than the thoughts you have about the things you derive passion from.

Why should people care about you? Undirected passion can create a mishmash of topics that in your mind may be interrelated, but to others may be completely random. Make sure your posts are purposeful. By giving yourself a reason for writing, you give others a reason for reading.

How do you differentiate yourself amongst other bloggers who share your passion? Be positional; offer to the world what no one else can: your opinion. "Blog like no one is reading." Don't be afraid to be in the minority. Others may present more compelling arguments but that doesn't take value away from yours. The only truly wrong opinion is the one not shared.

Price - In the blogosphere, the price one charges for their products (posts) is time (and to an extent, links, though those are unlimited and so slightly more irrelevant). What is going to make people check your blog today? The fact that if they read today's post tomorrow, they won't know when they'll read tomorrow's post. Create urgency by staying relevant.

Be present. This doesn't mean blog every day about every topic under the sun, but if you have something to say about a two week old news item, make sure it brings something revolutionary to the discussion or accept the fact that you should have written about it two weeks ago.

Place (Distribution) and Promotion - I've combined these two because blogs are an experiential good, and the act of distribution also serves promotional purposes as well.

This is where the 5th P comes into play. The only way to get people to notice you is to participate. Do this indirectly by getting the search engines to track you. Include Technorati tags in your posts. Get indexed by Google. Make the rest of the world be able to find you.

Speak with those who are relevant to your discussion. Comment on their blogs. Link to their posts. Do what it takes to prove to those who have made it that you also matter.

Technorati Tags: blogging, blogs, Steve Rubel, marketing, 4Ps, frameworks, passion

The other day I sent an e-mail off to Adam Curry about the Google Maps of aviation charts and he read my email on DSC 316! Man, was I excited when I heard him mention my email. Later on in the show, he talked about how podcasting is opening the channels of communication between podcasters/artists and their listeners and I'm thrilled to have just experienced that first-hand.

Today, I happened to pick up Robert Scoble and Shel Israel's new book, Naked Conversations and even though I've only read the first chapter already, I'm already excited about reading the rest of it. The first chapter details the story of how blogging got started at Microsoft and how it has helped Microsoft turn its public image around.

An interesting little anecdote mentioned is how they came up with the name Channel 9:

The name is derived from the United Airlines (UA) open audio channel, on which passengers can listen to pilots during take-offs, flights and landing.

It was this channel 9 that helped Lenn Pryor, former tech evangelist of Microsoft, overcome his fear of flying. In the same sense, Microsoft hopes to make people less afraid (or less hostile?) towards them by letting customers "listen in" on the company.

After spending all of last week attending presentations for internships in the financial services industry, these two events brought me real voices from inside companies after having to deal with all the garbage "corpspeak" that comes with those corporate presentations. A bit disturbing was that a quick search last week (which was by no means extensive) didn't produce any results for bloggers who work in financial services. Is the industry that competitive that no one is willing to give up any information that would take away their edge over their co-workers? Or am I just being antagonistic and the real reason is that blogging doesn't really have a place in B2B businesses?

Technorati Tags: Naked Conversations, Scoble, Shel Israel, blogging, blogs, communication, Adam Curry, Daily Source Code, podcasts, podcasting, marketing, finance, banking, B2B

Google has released a pretty robust website stats package called Google Analytics. Straight from the horse's mouth:

Google Analytics tells you everything you want to know about how your visitors found you and how they interact with your site.

I've been a bit unhappy with the stats package DreamHost comes with, though granted I don't have much use for it anyway. Installing Analytics was as simple as copying three lines of code into my template, so it's too easy to not try it.

I can't really say much about how it works or the data it reports since no data appears despite them saying it'll be available "within 12 hours." Apparently demand was greater than they expected. I guess that's bound to happen when you release free, easy and useful software and your name is Google. A message on their help page dated (timed?) 5:22 PST states:

Currently, report updating for Google Analytics is experiencing delays. As a result, you may not be seeing any data in your reports even after implementing the Analytics tracking code.

We are currently in the process of updating all reports. You should be able to see these updates in several hours. While this is going on, you may notice different reports updating at different rates. Once this process has completed, all data should be restored to your profiles. Please be assured that this update process has no effect on data collection.

We apologize for any inconvenience. This reporting delay is associated with unexpected demand for Google Analytics. Under normal circumstances, the data in your reports will be at most six hours old.

Technorati Tags: Google, Google Analytics, analytics, AdWords, AdSense, marketing, optimization, statistics, websites

Make this holiday season the most memorable ever by getting a great deal on fascists on eBay!

Merlin Mann of 43Folders has a really funny photoset of AdSense ads he collected from eBay. It seems that eBay's ads are tied to the actual search terms and so doing a Google Search for strange terms returns hilarious computer-generated ads.

Check out the photoset to see them all.

(via kottke.org)

Technorati Tags: 43Folders, Flickr, eBay, Google, AdSense, funny, search, marketing

Seth Godin links to a NYTimes story about how much space people actually use on their iPods. Well, of all the people surveyed by the Solutions Research Group in Toronto, half of them had less than 100 songs stored on their MP3 players and the average among those with iPods was 505 songs.

Now, this news comes a few days after I lost my 30GB iPod and started considering my replacement options. My iTunes library clocks in at 19.68GB but a Smart Playlist I made revealed that I only listened to over 4.27GB in the past 19 weeks. The new iPod nano is only 4GB and absolutely perfect. The problem is those few times when I would want to listen to one of the songs I don't have on the iPod. It's not so much the inconvenience of not having the song, its the disutility I get from the fear of not having a particular song.

Despite all this, I decided to go with a 1GB shuffle as a temporary solution. My rationale behind this is that Mac Expo is a week away and with the rumors that there's a video iPod coming out (or even larger capacity 4G iPods), I want to have the smallest investment in hardware as possible at this time. Even when I get a larger iPod, the shuffle still has its uses as a much smaller solid-state player and USB drive.

Getting back to Seth Godin's piece, he argues that a larger capacity iPod is more of a status symbol than a necessity:

We don't buy a bigger iPod because we need a bigger iPod. We buy one because we identify ourselves as the kind of person that doesn't squabble over a few bucks when it comes to buying the best.
…
Nobody buys "best" in everything in their life. But in every category that's not a commodity, somebody is buying "best" because they want to, not because they need to.

While I agree to some extent, I think his theory doesn't take into account that Apple positions the feature sets of their iPods to upsell people to the larger iPods they don't necessarily need. Look at the difference between the iPod nano and the iPod lines: anyone with >4GB of music has to get the 20GB iPod whether they have 4.5GB or 19GB of music, and for only $50, you bet that guy with 4.5GB is going to get the 20GB player. The same enormous storage gap (and small price gap) exists between the 20GB and 60GB iPods. With that type of upsell strategy and the fact that Apple doesn't offer iPods in, say, 2GB increments, of course there's going to be a trend to move up along the iPod lines.

I also think the Long Tail (as a proper noun) has a large part to do with Apple's offering of large iPods. The average iPod user might not need more than an iPod nano in terms of storage, but what about those on the Long Tail that do? I know several college students with fat internet connections who have over 50GB of music in their iTunes library (legality notwithstanding) who are more very happy Apple offers 60GB iPods. For all intents and purposes, the R&D cost of the 60GB iPod (or a hypothetical 80GB iPod) is zero and the cost of going from a 20GB to a 60GB drive is minimal. Being in relatively small packaging and easy to manufacture (and switch back to the 20GB "mainstream" iPods), a Long Tail does exist for the iPod and so it is viable to offer these huge iPods despite the statistics showing that "average" users don't need nearly as much storage as Apple offers.

Technorati Tags: Apple, iPod, iPod nano, nano, Long Tail, marketing, Mac Expo