This year, just keeping the logo in this post. I’ll be out all day volunteering – call this my first big volunteering year, I guess - at the local 4th of July event. Thank you one and all for reading, both new and long time readers alike.

Stats and some links to past posts over the six year period

Most words to date for a single published post: 4,791
How I fought a following too close ticket in Oregon published December 9, 2008

2009
1,673,808 total published words from 4,956 posts – 5,000 is just around the corner!
86,345 unpublished words from 332 posts
= 1,760,153 total words from 5,288 posts
= 332 average words per post

February 8, 2009: Maybe Wheaties should become the breakfast of pot smoking champions – Pot smoker or not, Michael Phelps will always be the man inside the pool of this decade.

2008

July 16, 2008: AmazonMP3 shows how to monetize Twitter – Of all the Twitter talk out there only a small few are monetizing this third party phenomenon. Will be interesting to see where things are at with this site in six more years. My guess? Something else will be more buzzworthy.

2007
 
July 5, 2007: Study finds that men are just as chatty as women – Plenty of other more deserving posts to be spotlighted here but this is a small example of the kind of subject matter that makes me go hmm.

2006

July 15, 2006: Auto date and timestamped entries in Notepad with handy .LOG trick – this still works! Once in awhile there is something real world useful at this site.

2005

July 1, 2005: $10,000 forehead caught on film – I wonder how much it cost to get this tat removed?

2004

July 21, 2004: Review: Flickr – photo sharing, photoblogging, groups and more – before Y! bought Flickr and it became an internet household name.

2003

July 30, 2003: Segways to be tested by Police in NY – remember how big the Segway was going to be? Despite having the chance to ride one, I still haven’t. You?

Thank you again for reading and, health willing, here’s to many more years of Things That … Make You Go Hmm.

The post that was being spammed was a recap of the Janet Jackson breast dustup back in 2004 where I proudly proclaimed that breast censoring, save for dramatic purposes, would not happen at this blog. Yes, I will still do love them tits!

If you follow the above blog’s RSS feed, you are treated to these worthless commercial interludes presumably to help ZDNet pay the bills. Sure, we could filter out crap like this by using a multitude of tools but haven’t enough readers railed against this type of pure noise, no signal use of RSS before? Sigh.

The television commercial model is under fire these days, at odds with common tech like DVR and the ability to buy TV series in higher quality on DVD and Blu-ray. There are a few scattered successes like the American Idol juggernaut, but by and large the way to make money on TV by interrupting viewers with commercials isn’t as healthy as it once was. And it was never a good idea to interrupt blog readers with a post consisting of only a clickable ad.

Then we’ve got DISH here locally and we still can’t watch ABC (channel 4) because of a fight over money, money, money that started in December with local station KOMO and Dish that resulted in the channel being yanked. When will it come back? Who knows. Meanwhile DISH customers go without why the finger pointing continues.

Where am I going with this? IT Project Failures is a ZDNet blog penned by Michael Krigsman. According to Krigsman’s ZDNet bio:

Michael Krigsman is CEO of Asuret, Inc. a consulting company dedicated to reducing technology implementation failures. Asuret’s suite of software tools improve the success rate of enterprise software deployments by quantifying and measuring governance issues that cause most project failures. Michael led the research effort underlying Asuret’s model of collective intelligence and its practical application to reducing IT failures in consulting environments.

And so presented to Mr. Krigsman via his blog’s RSS feed a “technology implementation failure” of dark proportions. Some free consulting courtesy of the RSS Zone. Unsubscribed.

One of the neat things about the Kindle is it has forever free wireless access to the Kindle store so anywhere you went that there was coverage, you could buy and read a book. Or even a blog. I submitted this blog eons ago but it never got added. You can probably guess the blogs you would find on the Kindle when Amazon chose them.

Well this changed this week when Amazon shared their new Kindle Publishing for Blogs area – open to all bloggers - which means the blog population in the Kindle Store could increase dramatically in the coming days, weeks and months.

Or maybe not, as it’s not like there are a zillion blog hungry Kindle store shoppers.

And unfortunately there is no option to choose what price to charge for the blog as Amazon sets that which is kind of a bummer because I would have chosen the absolute least price (likely free if it was available – which it isn’t - in fact). I marked down the Hmm updates to ‘1-2 updates a week’ for now since that’s pretty accurate as of late, but I suspect this frequency will be increased in the coming months as my stored up writing energy is starting to overflow.

Most blogs cost $1.99/month to subscribe to and the blog owner only gets 30%, so I won’t be retiring off Kindle blog subscription income any time soon.

If only blog publishers could add bonus content

Really wish there was a way I could push additional bonus content a la DVD extras out to these Kindle subscribers as I still have a significant backlog of unpublished posts. It would provide something extra to these paid subscribers to make it more worth paying for.

But so as not to punish loyal readers who didn’t own the Kindle and couldn’t subscribe, there could be a time decay on these posts that eventually kicks them out to everybody. Put that on my Kindle feature wish list for blog publishers. Actually, this might be possible by offering a separate feed for Kindle readers … only since you can’t password protect it or anything, once that feed address was released in the wild, anybody could simply subscribe to it instead of the main feed.

If anybody is reading any blogs through the Kindle, please let me know what you think of the experience. I’m curious.

Update 5/15/2009 6:05am PST: The Make You Go Hmm Kindle edition is live!

It can be found at the following location: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0029U2NUE

Just say no! Like this provides any sort of reader value?

There are less intrusive and more intelligent ways to detect the style of a blog post if that’s the aim of the software/service. Yeah, I’m looking at your Windows Live Writer even though this post is being written using that system. I just say no whenever asked this question because I don’t want any readers to see this trash. And for the systems out there who think it’s cool to do a temporary blog post to detect blog ownership, that’s even more stupid. If you’re the blog owner you can put some sort of image or file on the server that isn’t in a blog post to show you own the blog. Heck you could sandwich in a verification code at the end of a legitimate post and that wouldn’t be temporary trash.

I purposefully blurred out the offending blog above because I don’t want this to be about the offending blogger, but the system which is stupid. There were actually two of these in my RSS reader this morning. Two bloggers who didn’t realize that there is no such thing as temporary in the RSS world.

Once you hit publish and it changes the RSS feed it is released and somebody could see it somewhere else. One of your readers, your mother, the pope, the President, a terrorist, anybody. Do you want everybody to see your temporary trash? As a reader and blogger I sure don’t. Just say no!

Oh, and got to love the 13 FeedFlares attached to the signature. Yeah, I’ll digg this, stumble it, add to mixx, share in Facebook, yadda, yadda. Argh.

Unlike many other forms of new technology, one does not need to be a tech whiz to get up and running on Twitter - and this is a huge advantage over blogging.

Huge advantage? I wonder about that. It takes much less time to craft 140 character maximum updates than write a blog post, no argument there, but what about the other time Twitter takes that blogging doesn’t? The time to track, follow and reply to updates from others you follow? The time to find new and add new followers or remove those who are disruptive?

I think Twitter is a bit overstated in terms of long term business value. It’s a lot more useful than I originally thought and have since taken that criticism back, but it’s not something that every business or even most businesses that require an online presence absolutely must be involved with to help their business grow and succeed.

And, despite my affection for them, blogs aren’t absolutely required either.

Twitter as the relationship builder for, well, Twitterers

Sure, Twitter is great for building relationships with those who are into Twitter. But is that demographic vital to your business? I can safely say I’ve never had one client mention Twitter to me – ever – in our offline business. We have done business with plenty of young, old and middle-aged folks. I mentioned Twitter to a salesman trying to pitch yellow page ads to me and you’d have thought I was an alien.

Reality check.

Twitter is a massive river, flowing fast, free and wild and untamed at times. An online comparison I’ve made several times is a gigantic IRC chatroom with comments aplenty. Some of this activity river is caught by Google, but quite a bit isn’t. If you want to get something out there very fast, Twitter works great. If you want to follow along with feedback on a topic or event in real time, especially if folks are using hashtags like #topic_keyword to group, Twitter is a functional tool.

But Twitter sucks when it comes to the past.

Yeah, you can search through past tweets, but if they are stale beyond a few days or weeks, or in some busy twitterers case a few hours, it isn’t as useful. You can retweet and try and start up an old discussion, but that doesn’t work too well. And what about search engines? Something every business should care about because if people can’t find your business and you, how are you going to do business?

I started a blog for the reboot of our insurance business, but haven’t gotten setup with Twitter yet. Am I doing things backwards? I don’t think so. I wanted to make sure our new website got ranked in the search engines ASAP. Commenting on and/or through Twitter might make that happen if somebody blogged one of my Tweets, but it would be faster to just setup a blog and write an introduction post.

Here’s the funny thing: I didn’t even get my first blog post written and Google had already indexed the blog. The blog isn’t even linked off the home page of the site yet (bad, I know, but I’m not happy with the design yet, long story). Wonder if I had setup a Twitter account and made a few tweets referencing the site and see if the tweets got into Google faster?

Here’s a humorous aside. I showed my first offline business blog post from Saturday to a couple different friends. One loved my introductory blog post entitled, Saturday Morning Insurance Fever and another remarked that it was “too personal.” Since we are in a small town and our insurance agency has a personal feel, I’m ok with things being a little more personal in tone. I think the blog format, even for a business, works better in a less polished, but still professional tone. I’m hoping to post more informational pieces related to the insurance world going forward, but when you start a blog out and realize that some people reading might not know what a blog even is, it makes you go hmm. I need to show this first post and the blog in general to some clients and get their feedback. It’s on the to-do list, believe me.

Back to Twitter. The same friend who gave me the feedback on my first blog post that it was too personal has been using Twitter for his new online business Merchant’s Mirror (MM). He seems really excited about how Twitter is working for him. Allowing him to communicate with people in real time. I’m not completely certain how great it has been for generating business for MM so far.

My friend, Ben, is also blogging through his business site. I checked how many updates the Merchant’s Mirror blog has had since the year started? Three. Decided to check Google and see if I could find his “Merchant’s  Mirror goes live!” post. Indeed, it was the second result. Interesting that the tag for ‘live’ was ahead of the actual permalink page. Next I went to see what I could find in Google for the MM Twitter account. A search through Google for ‘twitter merchants mirror’ leads to Ben’s personal twitter account, not the business twitter account which is, appropriately located at twitter.com/merchantsmirror 

I was impressed to see that this account had 157 followers already. Well done, Ben. But I think my search engine point is made by trying to find merchant mirror tweets versus blog posts. One is easy to find, the other is not. This is what leads me to Twitter and blogs being two entirely different tools for a business owner. I think if a business can do both, it should. Not every business must have a blog, but those who would like to share information with their clients in a pull instead of push environment as well as help improve the online visibility of the business website blogs are powerful and useful.

Business blogs must be updated on a schedule

But blogs are far from perfect. I think a blog that is seldom updated does very little to help the business. In fact, if the blog gathers too much dust — it’s been too long without an update or updates seem to come with no pattern or reliability — then it could give the impression that nothing is happening at the business. Ouch, that’s the opposite of helpful.

So once you decide to start a blog for your business, then make it part of the workflow to keep it updated. I think it’s even more important for a business blog to be updated than a non-business blog. I don’t mean posting nonsense just so you can say hey, the blog is updated, but if there isn’t activity in your business that you can write about, then it’s not living, it’s dying. If you haven’t got the writing chops then designate blog updates to a trusted employee or partner. Make that individual your reporter and have them send the copy through you before hitting the publish button for the final ok. Make it a priority.

Too much hassle? Then don’t do a blog at all. It’s not the end of the world having an online business presence without a blog. Not having a business Twitter account isn’t either.

Ben’s MM blog is on the edge of not being updated enough to be as useful as it could be to the business. I wonder if a client and/or prospective client with a busy life and business subscribe to something that isn’t updated on a schedule or routine? My feedback for my friend’s business blog is simple: update on a schedule. If the schedule is once every two weeks or once a month, that’s cool, but there should be a minimum amount of updates on a schedule for a business blog.

I’m going to try and have a minimum of once per week updates to our business blog. I have a bunch of different post ideas in my head and need to put them down digitally. If I can update a couple times a week that would be awesome, but my goal will be once a week updates on average.

Effort is everywhere in business

Now getting back to Doc Kane’s comment that blogs require effort. Of course they do. Running a successful business requires lots of effort. Running a successful marketing campaign requires effort. Heck, running a successful business Twitter account requires effort. I’m sure the MM twitter account didn’t get 157 followers with no effort. I’m having a hard time thinking of anything in business that doesn’t require effort. You have to work it.

I plan to get on Twitter and Facebook and LinkedIn with our business, but am taking it slower. First, I’m starting with a blog and making sure I can schedule regular updates. I’m doing this blog for tomorrow. Don’t get me wrong, I’m worried about today too, and I think Twitter would be a handy tool for dealing with today.

For those businesses who don’t have a blog or use Twitter

Before publishing I asked another friend who is in the printing business how things were going. While some of their competitors are laying people off their business is up 30% and they are having a great year. They don’t use Twitter and they don’t have a business blog.

Twitter or blog absolutely required for business? No. Might one or both be helpful for some businesses? Yes. It’s up to you to decide in your own business how well these tools might fit. Be careful about jumping in just to say you have one because it might be better staying on the sidelines.

Misuse of punctuation and sometimes dubious word shortening aside, Twitter is pretty good for random, pithy musings. In the case of my update above, none of the folks following replied to this muse.

In 2009 I won’t be subscribing to any of the high volume, often multi-authored posting blogs, like Techcrunch, Mashable, Techdirt, Read/Write/Web, Boing Boing, Engadget, etc. If these blogs post something that catches my eye it will have to be through the filter of others that I am reading (am sure that will happen). This isn’t because these sites aren’t worth reading, it’s because they simply hog too much of my time. Google Reader trends shows how many posts per day blogs you follow are making over a 30 day period. Mashable, for example, shows 8.0 posts a day which to me is 5 posts too time hoggy. If Pete Cashmore is listening, please consider creating a separate best *3* post a day full RSS feed for readers like me.

Would like to subscribe to these blogs if they would consider offering a best of the day full text RSS feed option. And if any of these publications take this suggestion, please use the comments below and/or trackback to tell me about it. I realize that by filtering using something like Y! Pipes or FeedRinse I could hack up these busy sites feed into only showing a maximum number of posts, and I might be motivated to do that in 2009, but in the meantime it’s goodbye to all blogs, big and small blogs alike, who average more than three posts a day. Having read from the RSS firehose for a few years I’ve come to the following 6 brutal conclusions about blogs:

1. no blogs where a writer tries his/her best goes without writing at least one high quality post eventually
2. most blogs rarely have a high quality blog post
3. some blogs are lucky to have one high quality blog post a month (or even less infrequent)
4. even fewer blogs are lucky to have one high quality blog post a week
5. the fewest blogs out there are lucky to have one high quality blog post per day
6. no blogs have more than an average of three good quality blog posts per day

Let’s take these one at a time. With #1 it shows that time and effort eventually pay off. This is a tenet in life that works far outside the blogging realm. Don’t give up my fellow blogging bretheren.

#2 is what I think of as the scrapblogging mindset. What I put in a scrapbook is of interest to me. Maybe of great interest, but will it be to you? So many sites have tried to spawn services around this like Stumbleupon, Friendfeed, etc. I think the best of what I’m interested in finds its way into a blog post someday. The rest of that stuff is there for those who want to see the whole slushpile. I know those type people are out there, I’m just not one of them.

#3 and #4 fit most of the blogs I’m subscribed to and most interested in. Posts that strike a nerve about once a month on average. So in the case of firehose blogs like the ones mentioned above, I don’t see the point in skimming thousands of posts to find a dozen or so every month that I enjoy a great deal.

I can’t come up with any blogs that fit #5 or #6, can you?

I would like bloggers to filter their best stuff for me. Put on the editor’s hat and be picky about your own work. I’m asking you, readers with blogs having more than three posts, to go one further step each day: take the best three of each posts you make every day and put them in a standalone full text RSS feed that readers like me can subscribe to. Here’s the rules:

1. you can’t change posts throughout the day, three maximum posts in this feed. You are welcome to edit the posts as normal, but you can’t change to an entirely different post
2. if you have already selected your three best posts, tough, you’ll have to wait to publish to me tomorrow as one of your best three posts of the day
3. bonus: if you already make less than three posts a day on average you need change nothing

For those using Wordpress who publish more than three posts a day on average you could do something like I’m describing above without using a plugin. Just create a new category and mark that for your featured posts each day. Then provide readers like me the option to subscribed to this featured post category. By default Wordpress creates RSS feeds for each category.

Of course It’s ok to publish more than three posts per day

I’m not challenging the business aspect of why some blogs post more – a lot more – than necessary. The more you publish, the more you push your message and blog brand if you will out there, the more chances you’ll have to grab eyeballs and mindshare. I get the business and promotional part of publishing 10 or more posts a day and have even suggested to bloggers in the past that the best way to increase your readership is to increase both the quality and number of posts published per day. I don’t think there is any blog out there that couldn’t increase readership by focusing on making the highest quality three posts max per day. Beyond that number there is this nagging little consequence of increased frequency:

Readers don’t have time.

We will make time if the material is very good, but what is good to me and good to you is subjective. I’ve had this discussion over what makes a quality blog post before and it usually goes nowhere that everyone agrees upon. That’s ok. One thing, however, that is not subjective is quantity. Give two readers three fish to eat and they both have three fish to eat.

Not monopolizing reading time

As you post more, readers invariably will skim more of what you write. Post less frequently, focusing more on quality and guess what happens? You create scarcity. It’s the whole author publishing one book a year on average scenario. If you follow many popular authors the trend is to publish a new hardcover once a year. The paperback comes out about six months after the hardcover and then promotes the upcoming hardcover book. If somebody like Stephen King posted a new novel say every three months some of his most passionate readers might be all giddy but slower readers like me would get behind and buy fewer of his books.  So a little scarcity blog posting analogous treatment could be a good thing.

Hey, when XYZ publishes something it’s worth stopping and reading the whole thing.  I may not see another XYZ post for __ hours.

Versus:

Oh man, not another post from XYZ. Don’t need to read this very closely because another will be along in ___ minutes.

In 2009 I must cut some corners on how my time is allocated online. There are areas I’d like to increase my time spent and yet need to reduce my time overall. One of the cuts is I’m going to (try) using only one RSS reader. Most people probably only use one RSS reader anyway and I’m the rare geek who uses more than one regularly. Google Reader doesn’t have all the features I want, but it’s about as close to useful and integrated with my Google account and bookmarks as any other RSS reader, so that’s the direction I’m choosing for 2009. For now, at least. Maybe that will change later this year.

Gone will be using ReBlog as I’ve done the last three years. This means my shared OPML file on the homepage of RSS feeds being followed will change. I believe Google Reader offers a way to share my OPML, but not sure as of this writing that it can be dynamically generated and accessed. On the list to-do list.

My preference in 2009 is not to cut back on the number of RSS subscriptions, heck I’d like to increase the number to get a wider variety of sources, but some additional quality control is needed.

1,095 posts a year is still a lot

I’m looking in the mirror here too, trust me. I won’t be publishing any more than *3* posts a day on average in 2008 at this blog. If you do the math you can figure out the maximum number of blog posts you could see published here in 2009 will be:

365 days x 3 posts per day = 1,095 posts

How many posts were published at Hmm in 2008? 225, an average of about 19 posts per month and included three months where there were less than 10 posts for the month (yowsa, a post every other day on average during those months). I might have gone to the other extreme. My published post goal for 2009 is at least 500 posts. We’ll see how that goes.

2008 was the lowest number of posts published in a year here to date and had a frequent reader remark to me that “you aren’t posting as much any more.” He’s correct. There was a couple back to back months in the past (April 2005 - 140 posts, May 2005, 2005 – 145 posts) where I published more blog posts than all of 2008. We’ll see how this 2009 max 3 posts per day plan will go. Could fall off the wagon, you never know. That would be hmm inspiring.

As I’m going back through with my editor’s hat on, having the benefit of time and distance (very important editorial skill, mind you), some of the posts made in these heavy quantity months were lower quality. Some of them are like a link or two with a picture. To make it worse some of the links are broken in the shorter posts. I’ve been working my way back through these anemic posts bulking them up and trying to make crepe out of crap with footnotes so I can not be embarassed that my name is on them going forward. Some other bloggers I’ve talked with have indicated that the archive posts are old news and not worth updating but I don’t share those feelings.

Does this mean that some days in 2009 there could still be more than three posts? Sure, an average is just that: average. But I’m going to try and stay away from doing much burst publishing unless there is a really good reason (like I enter another blogathon or live blog an event perhaps). In fact, most of the post you’re reading if you got this far (thanks!) was written in a day when three posts had already been published. So I held it over and finished this morning. There will be other days when I don’t have enough time to write and publish three posts.

Your turn. What do you think of this max 3 post per day average feed limit? Good idea, bad idea? I think there are a lot of bloggers who would love to be able to publish 1,095 posts a year, so this is speaking more to the larger, multi-authored blogs who, right or wrong, gobble a little too much time with their current firehose publishing output. We’ll see how many of these blogs care about keeping readers like me subscribed.

I don’t write here about our offline business very much other than to refer to it as our “offline business” – in fact the number of times I’ve mentioned specifically what this business does and/or how it might be related is in at best a scattered few posts. Nowhere in the site about page or my bio at TD Scripts does it indicate what our offline business is about either. Is there some reason I’ve kept this business a bit mysterious?

Yes, a couple reasons.

But before we get to those reasons, let me tell you briefly about the business. My wife and I have owned and operated an insurance agency since 1994. I am licensed to do business in both Washington and Oregon (non-resident). It’s mostly our gig together, although we have had some hired help, mostly part time over the years. I’m not one of those in your face, let me quote you ASAP insurance agents and thus haven’t written about this here because there isn’t much internet-related stuff we’ve done to talk about. What the business is and what we do is not that relevant to the vast majority of post topics I write and publish here. It’s not that I’m trying to avoid promoting or even mentioning our offline business or anything, it’s that we just aren’t doing that much online where it makes sense to bring it up here. Also, without going through the site demographics (but I do intend to do that), I’m not sure exactly what percentage of readers here are locals which is where we’re doing the bulk of our insurance business. I know a few readers are nearby like Sterling but even he’s not exactly in our backyard. He’s still a good 45 minute drive or so away.

I’m also careful, very careful, that my clients might not perceive that this blog – if any of them have ever connected the dots (to my knowledge, not yet) — in any way has anything to do with them and/or our business with them. This site, even the pen name you all are used to me using online, only has my heart, energy and passion in common. Almost nothing else online has anything to do with our offline business. Conversely what happens online is very rarely mentioned to our insurance clients offline.

Client’s lives are very private and confidential between us and them and it’s wrong to write about our business with them in any way that is other than very, very generic without their knowledge or consent. If you happened to be one of our clients the last thing I’d want for you to do is go online and Google your name and find something here at MakeYouGoHmm (or our other online properties) about you without your knowledge and consent. I’ve been very careful about making sure this doesn’t happen. It’s part of demonstrating our trust level with clients that what we know about them stays with us and companies that have a need to know basis to conduct business.

It’s our client’s business how little or how much they want their names to be used online. I have and will continue to respect that immensely. I haven’t even used my own name online to date very much, so why should I not treat clients the same? The answer is I should give them even more consideration than given myself – and will continue to do so in 2009 and beyond.

But there are some times when businesses we insure might want us to provide a little spotlight on them and what their business is and does. Sort of promotional and personal. Especially in these economic times. So we might be able to use our business website to help from time to time promote some of the businesses we do business with.

Now back to those reasons for me keeping the offline business away from this blog.

For one, this is a business where we have barely used the internet to establish and foster client relationships since 1994. This doesn’t mean we’re behind on technology or anything, quite the opposite. We were among the first in representing our primary insurer (company) that started capturing and using email in the nineties for communication. At the time this was so controversial that I actually received a cease and desist order from the company threatening to terminate our agency appointment if we continued. A couple years later I was at a meeting when myself and other similar business owners were told by a company executive that we were “behind the times” if we didn’t have a program for collecting email addresses.

Smile, I did. I still have that letter and have thought about framing it and putting it inside the foyer of our office. I may do that in light of the big 2009 changes upon us. I think some clients would get a kick out of it. It’s one of those stories I’ll probably never tire of telling.

We did have a business presence website on our own domain – basically a one page deal – for several years. I also own and operate the city’s domain where we are located for over 10 years now. Our original business website and domain has since been deactivated because I hated the domain name and fact that we were handcuffed as to what we could do there without jumping through a bunch of company hoops. The domain was way too long to remember and type. It wasn’t the type of thing that clients were going to remember easily – and thus we didn’t even bother telling many clients about it, much less use it as any sort of marketing.

Big change #1: we’re going totally independent

After almost 15 years our agency is going totally independent in 2009. What does this mean when we already have been an independent contractor? That word independent in the insurance world can have an asterisk depending on the type of companies the agent is appointed to do business with and the contracts they sign.

An independent agent has one major difference from an agent who is captive or as was our case for many years: semi-captive. State Farm and Allstate insurance agents, for example, are captive agents. These agents cannot place business “outside” with other carriers by contractual obligation. Yes, even if the best premium price with an equally stable financial company involving their client’s risk is elsewhere.

The contract with our primary carrier has been semi-captive in that it required us to place all business that qualified with them, regardless of price (premium). I’ve never liked this aspect of the contract. That we were forced by contract to place business with a single company when we could find a less expensive rate from an equally respected company elsewhere.

Now we can do what other independent agents have been used to doing: match client needs with the best companies and rates in their area. So if you reside in the state of Washington or Oregon and are looking for an online-savvy independent insurance agent – hey, a softball pitch here - who has this as a guiding principle drop me an email and we’ll see if we can find a good match for your insurance needs.

This is nearly a complete reboot of our offline business.

We are starting almost, almost completely over. This means we’re going from a very comfortable monthly income (in our offline business) to almost $0/month since the primary carrier we’re separating from is keeping all the client files. We have always been commission only, but the longer you are in business the more renewals you tend to amass. We aren’t going to have those renewals any more from that carrier. The carrier even get our primary business phone number, by contract, that we’ve used since 1994. The contract also allowed for them an option on our physical office location but they aren’t executing that right (yet). If they do, there is a spot right next door and we’ll lease that in a heartbeat.

So our main business phone line is changing, our signage, business cards, logos, etc, but not our office location. This should be a very interesting year. We could fail with this change. Badly. As mentioned earlier in this piece, the economy is not stellar. We’re gambling that by going independent and helping clients find the best companies with great rates, we’ll be better positioned in the future. Ask me in a year or two if this was a smart move and I’ll be better able to answer.

Scary? You bet. But exciting too.

The disadvantage of being an independent agency – and to be fair, I have to bring this up - is one of company loyalty from both sides: agent and client (insured). Clients who move their business around more frequently will lose loyalty discounts for companies that offer them. Agents who have less profitable books of business seem to tend to receive less leeway by non-captive companies and the fewer number of clients with each company means less premium in the pool for the agency to draw from to establish overall profitability (one big claim can devastate a smaller agency’s profitability). Since we’re still very new to the independent side, this is partly based on how much emphasis is being placed on profitability with the carriers we’ve started talking to.

Add to the above that insurance carrier underwriters at renewal periods tend to treat accounts a little better who have longer history versus those who are newer and less established when it comes to deciding to non-renew over increases in claim activity. It’s not a risk-free proposition to switch insurance companies only over price if that happens to be when bad times fall upon you and a few claims roll in.

So just because we will be able to find clients the best possible price we’re still going to do our due diligence making sure that the company with the good rates is highly rated and a good about paying claims in a timely and fair manner. We aren’t going to go with some fly by night outfit just to get clients the absolute lowest price.

As an independent we’ll try to measure risk, price, company and individual client needs against this principle. It may be in a client’s best interest to stay with an insurance carrier that has a higher premium for this loyalty factor even though our agency would not be contractually obligated to keep this business with said company. This is a major procedural business change for us and will be interesting to see how we balance this with each client individually.

I suspect from experience that customers will tell us that they want the lowest rate coupled with our established, personalized agency service over company loyalty discounts, as that’s what we’ve been hearing. The decision, of course as always, will be up to them.

Big change #2: increase offline business internet presence

This brings us to our second big change and one of the reasons I’m writing about this here and now: a (much) bigger internet presence. We’re working on a separate, brand new website, one which I’m building mostly myself from the ground up, including all the backend scripting for our agency related functions. I am planning a business blog on this new site and am hoping it won’t suck like a lot of the business blogs I’ve seen. I notice a lot of our local area insurance agents don’t even have blogs, so am hoping to capitalize on that inequity somewhat.

I would like our blog to be both professional but also personal because that reflects our service level. And it should be informative and comment on insurance-related issues. I would also like to use this blog as a platform for communicating how our independent agency gig is going with our clients.

Where in the past I wouldn’t have done so here, I might also meta comment on a few posts like I’ve done with the group blog I contribute to at VTOR. It won’t be every other post or annoyingly frequent as I believe strongly that a little goes a long way on the web. Those who are interested in following in greater detail my virtual world happenings should know by now that VTOR is the best place to do that, not here, and likewise those who want to follow our independent insurance related experiences will do it at the new blog (and it’s not live as of this writing, so no link).

That brings us to big change #3. Well, big change if you read this blog and for some reason decide to start reading the insurance agency blog too.

Big change #3: hi, my name is Todd, nice to meet you

The biggest change at our new business blog for readers of Hmm will be my name. And forgive the liberal use of the third person in this section, it’s awkward for me too, but readers here that visit/read the new business blog will not see me writing under the pen name of ‘TDavid’ – ever. It will be my first name which I’ve rarely used here or anywhere else online. In fact, I’ve demanded that ‘TDavid’ or ‘TD’ be used and not my legal name when it has anything to do with our online business ventures to date.

When it involves insurance-related matters things will be different going forward.

It goes beyond the business blog and website though, I’ll also be signing up for services that ‘TDavid’ may also be signed up for and some that ‘TDavid’ doesn’t use (either at all or very often) like Facebook which requires your real name. LinkedIn is another. Not sure about MySpace. Twitter? Maybe. Friendfeed? Doubtful at the start.

The thing is that there is going to be some crossover here and there and it will be interesting to see how to deal with essentially three online personalities: ‘TDavid’ that most people know me as online is still going to be around, TD Goodliffe and various other virtual world identities and the introduction and promotion for our offline business under my legal first name.

I’m going to try to avoid having a personality disorder in 2009, but in some ways I’m concerned that might happen, which is another reason I’ve been ‘TDavid’ online. Just to be clear, I’ll still be writing as ‘TDavid’ here and anywhere that doesn’t have to do directly with our insurance business but since my picture is going to appear from time to time under my legal name, I want to be sure to disclose why this will be happening and that I’m not trying to be two completely different people or anything, I’m just trying to keep different businesses separated.

You might see some overlap between the same entity under different names, just as there have been with my virtual world adventures, I guess is the one sentence way to describe this change.

With that in mind, I’d still appreciate if you would continue to refer to me as TD or TDavid on this blog, BTW – and please not the hatcheted name without the ‘T’ in front. Let’s save the Todd stuff for the business site/blog and the TD Goodliffe (or other virtual name) for the virtual world side. If you were playing Everquest II with me as my character Humosorf and we were role-playing, that’s the name I’d expect to be used there as well. This will all be much easier to explain in this business than our insurance business which I’m not sure how or when I’m going to try and do so. Little steps first and too many other priorities ahead of that.

Anyway, I’m hearing fireworks outside. Woohoo, 2009 is here! Change has arrived. Are you ready? Let’s seize those golden 2009 opportunities and make the best of them. If you can help other people even more in 2009 like I’m excited that we’re going to be able to do, then go for it.

Thank you for reading and Happy New Year!

All this fun is happening under a blog with the profane title to match the often profanity-laced postings. A less profane sample:

You know, Wombat, all I do is love you. But is that good enough for you? No, you have to look at wombats in magazines and ask, "Why can’t I look like that?" Well, I’m not here to boost your ego, I’m here to have a life with you. SO STOP FISHING FOR COMPLIMENTS, WOMBAT.

Doubtful that Wombat will be subscribing to this RSS feed, but I did.  Having seen and read all kinds of different blogs, this one stuck out. This is a good example of what new blogs need to do to get noticed in the sea of blogs out there.

Bza, now go get your own domain and give Blogger the boot, I’m betting the FU Penguin dot com is available or some clever variation.

But pagination [is] useful for long articles, so get used to it
- Richard MacManus October 9, 2008

Get used to it? Why should we have to, Richard? We’ll just unsubscribe if the fumes become too noxious. I know there’s a smiley there, but seriously Richard, why do you think pagination is useful for “long articles”?

Let’s dissect this.

Splitting single posts into multiple pages is a disincentive for visiting and reading your site. Let’s say I’m on a mobile device like an iPhone or Pocket PC viewing the web page (and not using the RSS feed). Mobile devices don’t have as much viewing space so having one page that can be worked in and scrolled is easier than loading a second page and continuing. Readers are being forced to wait for the continuance or conclusion of the post. How is this useful?

When your internet connection is spotty

Or what if I’m reading your blog post while traveling and am losing internet? On long trips this can happen as you come in and out of range. So I can’t load the conclusion of the article until I get internet again because of the pagination. How is this useful?

But wait, devil’s advocate, more text = bigger page = longer page loading, right? You’re saving me time by paginating the blog post?

Splitting up a long article so the post loads ‘faster’

This is weak too. Don’t forget to add the combined time of loading all pages versus loading a single page.

What’s the longest post ever made on ReadWriteWeb? The longest one here to date in over five years is almost 4,800 words. That post page size is 47K. The average length of a post here is 330 words. I checked a post that size for comparison and it was 15K. So there’s what, 32K difference in page size? I realize we aren’t calculating in images or other media used in posts so an image heavy post would be a different discussion, but for a primarily text blog post, there isn’t a huge difference here. Certainly not worth splitting the page and trying to pass this off as useful for readers.

There probably is a ceiling number of words where having a single post paginated starts making a little sense. Is it more than 5,000 words? 10,000? Tell me what you think in the comments area. I know after thousands of posts here I haven’t seen this ceiling even one time. I can’t remember reading a post from others where I thought, hey it would have been a reader benefit to me if this post was broken into pieces.

Conversely, I’ve read many, many articles broken into self-serving pieces and been annoyed that it wasn’t a single page.

Broadband users would see very little difference in page-loading speed between 15K and 47K. For those still on dial-up there would be a delay loading the single page but if you calculate the additional delay of loading the second or subsequent pages required by pagination the speed would likely be negated.

Richard responds to Zemanta CTO on “horrible experience for the readers” comment

Andraz Tori might have some self interests in his dislike in pagination, but Richard’s reply makes no sense (emphasis mine).

Andraz, pagination is perfectly legit way to break up long articles. That’s why we are doing it. I honestly don’t know why people moan about it. It’s one click extra, is that so bad? Why is clicking one more time a "horrible experience"?
- Richard MacManus December 10, 2008

The emphasized confusion Richard seems to be experiencing can be easily explained. People are “moaning” about it because they. Don’t. Like. It.

Richard please explain somewhere why you think pagination of blog posts is a “perfectly legit” way to break up long articles? There is nothing perfect about it. As for legitimate? To whom? Why would you even want to do something the vast majority of readers don’t like. Let me stop you from using the “not many people complain” line. The reality is very few will complain like Andraz, myself and others are doing. The ones that don’t complain and just leave might be the ones to worry even more about.

As for it being one click extra? Come on, it’s more than that. It’s loading/reloading your progressively worse ad-filled page around the content. It’s not just a click to have AJAX populate more content on the page. If that’s all you were doing you might be able to hold to that excuse.

Blog history without pagination

Using the WayBackMachine let’s go back in time to see what ReadWriteWeb looked like when it started and compare to today. It’s interesting to note that from 2003-2007 no pagination within posts was used. Why after five years would Richard’s feelings about pagination within single blog posts changed? I think the pictures tell the story better than words.

2003 - ReadWriteWeb Oct 14, 2003 – no pagination

Amazing how clean a blog starts out, eh? Now see this same post today, some 5+ years later:

2004 - ReadWriteWeb Oct 10, 2004  (side by side with same post 4+ years later) – no pagination

2005 – ReadWriteWeb Oct 12, 2005 (side by side with same post 3+ years later) – no pagination

2006 – ReadWriteWeb Oct 10, 2006 (side by side with same post 2+ years later) – no pagination

2007 – ReadWriteWeb Oct 9, 2007 (side by side with same post 1+ year later)

Don’t take only my word on pagination on single blog posts as a NON reader benefit 

I asked on Twitter if anybody else saw any reader benefit in pagination for blog posts. Here are the responses from MikeG1, addictedtovinyl, pwinn, jason_z, Rocinante and pugofwar:

One of my twitter updates this morning specifically mentioned @rww which is Richard’s Twitter. He hasn’t responded yet but I’ll be happy to update this post with his thoughts, if he doesn’t leave them in the comments and/or trackback area below.

No absolutes, is there ever a good time to break up single blog posts?

I can think of two good times I’d like to see blog posts paginated: when they aren’t single blog posts and for dramatic effect.

For example: a blogger telling me a story in chapters. Each chapter could be broken up into parts and put on separate pages. I could even see breaking up major dramatic moments in the story – for added effect – into multiple posts. Paginating fiction makes sense as a reader benefit. It’s intentional for dramatic effect.

I was tempted to paginate this post for dramatic effect. Really. Like imagine if each bolded heading was a different page? I think that would have been fun in an artistic way. I understand and appreciate style and humor. But back to the title … would this dramatic execution have been a benefit for readers? Probably more like a Hitchcock device.

Can you think of any other time that would be a benefit to you as a reader to have a blog post and/or article paginated?

Jump the shark moment for RWW?

In fairness to Richard and RWW it’s important to end reminding they are not doing pagination on every post (yet). Don’t jump the shark, please.

Since it’s not happening on every post I’m not going to stop following the signal. Consider this a reader correction that a likable publication is doing something reader unfriendly and is misguided if they believe it’s some kind of benefit to readers. If they – or any other blog we follow get too annoying with and obvious with unnecessary pagination – and even one post paginated that doesn’t need not be is eyebrow raising – we should vote with our feet. Should they care? Why not, we’re just readers and there are many other readers to abuse, right? (wrong)

Proponents of single post pagination might say: but wait, just read the RSS feed, no pagination there. When you want to interact as a reader with a blog, you don’t inside the RSS reader. When you want to show a site you generally like some comment love and/or follow the advertisements they offer, you don’t do that from the RSS reader. Most blog posts I like, I check the web version to see if there are embeds or IFRAMEs I might have missed – again, you don’t do that from the RSS reader.

Will end by asking Richard to remember where he came from and that part of the reason RWW gained readers was because it provided good content in a clean, reader-friendly environment. Never forget your roots.