Consciou.us

How to drive traffic from Pinterest

Bradley Young — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 02:59:58 +0000

If you’re in certain social circles, you’ve probably heard of Pinterest. It’s a deceptively simple site, allowing you to create a virtual pinboard, where you can pin pictures of stuff (that’s a technical term!). I think that most marketers (even the social media types) haven’t yet gotten on the bandwagon, because it isn’t 100% clear how to leverage Pinterest to drive usage/traffic/conversions.

Here are some things to think about when attempting a “Pinterest strategy”.

Know thy audience. Pinterest primarily caters to women, and specifically to fashion, decorating, etc., but I’ve actually had a fairly decent response (from men and women) when posting geek humor and guns.
If it has a strong visual representation, then it will likely work on Pinterest.
The images have a viral/sharing aspect: others “re-pin” (copy the image to one of their pinboards) or “favorite” your postings if they like them.
Images can contain a price– having something that looks like a price in the text of the pin (e.g. $500 vase) will cause the price to show up as a banner in the upper left corner. Items with prices, in my unscientific testing, tend to have higher engagement rates.
The images contain a “backing URL”– if you click the image, this is the URL that it will go to.

So, here’s a thought for you.

If you have a site that:

Has images of your wares.
Has pricing for your wares.
Has a link to purchase said wares.

You have a shopping cart. Combine that with a highly engaged user base, and there is potential. Go put it to use!

Digging Ditches vs. Breaking Rocks

Bradley Young — Sat, 24 Dec 2011 20:15:35 +0000

Much has been made of the Internet and cloud computing making it easier than ever to get started in business.

This has spawned a lot of innovation. But there are still a lot of capital intensive, hard problems out there that are waiting to be attacked. Kudos to guys like Elon Musk for working on hard problems, like trying to get 10,000 people to Mars.

So, I’d like to ask: if you have the means, are you digging ditches or breaking rocks?

The difference is that digging ditches is easier to start, but you’re really working with rock that’s already been broken down. Breaking rocks requires tools, and you pound away at the problem for a long time before the problem seems to crack.

Only vision and determination can break rocks. Think bigger.

The Joy of Statistics

Bradley Young — Sun, 02 Jan 2011 05:37:48 +0000

This video is well worth the investment of an hour. Coverage of historical statistics, Florence Nightingale, astronomy, information presentation, etc. And the narrator is so excited about the subject, that you can’t help but be interested.

Meteor Dashboard screencast

Bradley Young — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 22:46:06 +0000

An ad-hoc screencast of the Meteor Solutions dashboard:

Unable to display content. Adobe Flash is required.

What, you need a subpoena to read my mail?

Bradley Young — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 05:31:16 +0000

http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/12/breaking-news-eff-victory-appeals-court-holds

I’m feeling a little cynical tonight, but maybe there is a ray of hope– one of the circuit courts actually managed to make a common sense judgement regarding computers.

I love the smell of email in the morning… it smells like victory!

Django and FastCGI (Ubuntu)

Bradley Young — Sun, 11 Jul 2010 06:49:21 +0000

Since some of the other tutorials seem incomplete, here is how to set up Django to run under FastCGI on Ubuntu.

Here is an init script:


#!/bin/bash
### BEGIN INIT INFO
# Provides:          fastcgi-django
# Required-Start:    $all
# Required-Stop:     $all
# Default-Start:     2 3 4 5
# Default-Stop:      0 1 6
# Short-Description: starts the django fastcgi server
# Description:       starts django fastcgi using start-stop-daemon
### END INIT INFO
USER=www-data
ROOT=/path/to/django
start() {
echo -n "Starting Django FastCGI: "
su $USER -c "$ROOT/manage.py runfcgi mode=threaded socket=$ROOT/fcgi.sock pidfile=$ROOT/fcgi.pid"
RETVAL=$?
echo "FastCGI Django."
}
stop() {
echo -n "Stopping Django FastCGI: "
kill `cat $ROOT/fcgi.pid`
RETVAL=$?
echo "FastCGI Django."
}
case "$1" in
start)
start
;;
stop)
stop
;;
restart)
stop
start
;;
*)
echo "Usage: django-fastcgi {start|stop|restart}"
exit 1
;;
esac
exit $RETVAL

and since we put the proper LSB header on the file, we can run:

update-rc.d fastcgi-django defaults

And it will be installed to run at boot.

The value of being unflappable.

Bradley Young — Sat, 08 May 2010 00:37:20 +0000

Forget Rep Hank Johnson. Forward to 1:17.

Pay attention to how the Admiral responds: other than a slight telltale (touching his face), he responds admirably to a question that is a definite oddball.

No betrayal of emotion, no push back, just a clear, succinct answer to the question– “we don’t anticipate that”. He then supports his argument by giving scale to the discussion.

This is one of the key hallmarks of an effective sales person: grace under pressure.

An expectation of email privacy

Bradley Young — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 19:58:50 +0000

The New Jersey Supreme Court handed down a decision this week that may well change the landscape of email privacy. It has broad-reaching implications, and will be tough to implement.

Further details: http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2010/03/nj_supreme_court_rules_employe.html.

There are several key points at play, and my feeling is that there will need to be more decisions before the full scope and meaning is made clear.

The emails were sent to her attorney.
The emails were sent from a company PC.
The emails were not sent from a company email account (they were sent from a yahoo account).
The “computer experts” retrieved the email anyway (grabbed it from the browser cache or proxy cache?).
The emails were marked as attorney-client privileged.

The court has stated that she has a reasonable expectation of privacy under her circumstances, which I assume to mean:

In New Jersey, if you use a company PC to send mail to your attorney through an external mail provider, and that mail is marked as attorney-client privileged, you have a reasonable expectation of privacy.

That being said, I’m going to offer some advice: Never send anything on a work computer that you do not want on the front page of the NY Times.

And employers, secure in your “well we made you sign the agreement waiving all your rights” clause, please come down from the mountaintop, and deal with people in a reasonable fashion. Hint: reading people’s web caches isn’t it.

A tale of two registrations

Bradley Young — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 01:52:00 +0000

It was the best of registrations, it was the worst of registrations… just kidding.

Here are two alternates for the new Sage Steps registration page, and I’d like to solicit your feedback.

Which of these do you like better? The mad-libs version, or the “traditional” version?

I’m psychic!

Bradley Young — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 03:10:00 +0000

I have developed a tremendous psychic ability to read people’s minds. This has taken years of training, and arduous study at a Shaolin temple, but I’m finally ready to “out myself”.

So here it is.

I’m going to read your mind.

Here’s the question, and then I’m going to tell you what you were thinking:

How many kilowatt hours did you use last month?

And the answer?

I’m getting something… vaguely… ~~one of your relatives is trying to communicate from beyond the veil…~~

Here’s what you’re thinking: “I don’t know.”

Aren’t I amazing? Well, yes, but that has nothing to do with it: I’ve asked this question a lot of times. I have had one person that knew (and he’s in a “carbon measurement” startup). The rest answered, “I don’t know.”

It is very difficult to improve something that you measure, and things that you measure improve virtually automatically. It is time to begin to measure how much energy, water and fuel that you use. Because we can all improve our environmental impact.

Note that this doesn’t address any particular ideology: you should be measuring whether you want to save the planet, or if you want to save money every month on your power bill.