Yesterday I wrote about how my new Klipsch speakers were going bonkers with a wild blaring alarm sound and how I could have avoided it if I had just researched the speakers in their forum or the Amazon reviews. Well, the speakers are working now (no idea why) and last night at 9:33PM--while I was doing Kanye West's STRONGER at the Mahalo karaoke party--I got an email from someone at Klipsh.My post was written at 12:32PM. So, due to my blog I was able to get direct customer support within nine hours. That's kind of rad and I think it's the future. I have searches setup for the "calacanis" and "mahalo" and I respond to folks who blog about us in two minutes to two hours on average I would say. In fact, if you go do a search for Mahalo you'll see that many time I'm the first comment under a blog post. For me engaging with customers is one of the most important things you can do in business.In fact, if you want to be on my radar the best thing to do is blog about what you think about Mahalo because you can be 100% sure I'll read it. Some of the folks I have a really deep blog relationship with right now are folks like the SEO GreyWolf, Technosailor who loves to predict my doom, the self-loathing gossiper Owen Thomas, and the highly-cantankerous CenterNetworks. I've secretly (and loving) named them the "Calacanis Wack Pack" (hat tip: Howard) since these guys are exactly the kind of folks I WOULDN'T hang with in the real world typically. Online? They take half my attention! They're very smart... they fight up, bust my chops, and keep my honest. I love them... I mean, I hate them often... but I love them for caring and speaking their mind--even when they're wrong. As they say on Facebook, it's complicated. Now, is this Klipsch early response because I'm a (supposed) "A-list" blogger or because they are tracking such things? Did someone email them my post? Who knows, who cares... they are on it! Frankly, I don't even know what the team "A-list" means and I've never bought into it since anyone can be on the A-list if they blog intelligently for a couple of months/years. In fact, being the A-list of a bunch of misfits--which is what bloggers (myself included) typically are--is like saying you're the Mayor of an insane asylum.Congratulations! Put the ball in the basket Chief! It's easier than you think, Chief. But I digress... the Klipsch speakers that I hated yesterday because of the problem that went away I now love because I feel like someone at the company will solve the problem instantly for me if it comes back. Now I can recommend to folks they get Klipsch products because a) they sound great and b) if they have problems at least you know they really care.That's more than I can say about the @#$%#$% folks at Asurion! OK... I'm off to the speaking gig at UCLA. Here's the email name removed... j~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Hi Jason,My name is [TKTKTK]--I work in the [TKTKTKT] departmentat Klipsch. I came across your blog concerningthe trouble you've had with the 2.0s. I'm curiousif you have contacted us for help in getting themexchanged? They carry a one year warranty. I'malso aware of other complaints on our forum andamazon.com, but we do analyze our data closely tofollow product trends and address issues asnecessary. The internet is an extremely skewedexample of how well a product is performing, andin the case of the 2.0s, they are a solid systemoverall.I'm sorry you feel no one at Klipsch is listening,but honestly nothing is further from the truth.We absolutely honor warranties on all ourproducts, and if there was a defect discovered inthe design of any model, an engineering changewould be made promptly--implemented in the nextproduction run.Our forum is a peer to peer support network, andnot all posts are responded to by Klipschpersonnel. We do have a very sincere relationshipwith our customer base however, and allcalls/emails are answered as promptly as possibleby customer service and tech support reps who workfor Klipsch at our engineering and administrativeheadquarters. Any reoccuring complaints arephysically walked downstairs to our engineers tobe addressed promptly. We have nothing to gain byknowingly selling defective merchandise!Please also note that the Ultra 2.0s have been outof production for many months, replaced recentlyby the Groove PM 20 model.If you have any questions or need help setting upan exchange, please do not hesitate to contact me.Thank you![TKTKTKTKKT]Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments
EdWords@polledemaagt Calacanis heeft wel meer herrie gemaakt de laatste maanden, o.a. in SEO-landin Rotterdam11hours ago Polledemaagt@bas Heb je die herrie een tijd geleden meegekregen tussen Calacanis en Winer (als ik me niet vergis)in Tilburg11hours ago basvandenbeld@Polledemaagt, ja grappig bedacht he van die Calacanis? Aparte vent, maar wel slim...in VoorschotenPermalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments
How to Plan a Killer Halloween Party How to Trick or Treat Safely How to Plan a Kids' Halloween Party How to Carve a Killer Pumpkin How to Have the Best Halloween Costume at the Party How To Cook Pumpkin Seeds Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments
I bought these well reviewed Klipsch ProMedia Ultra 2.0 PC speakers and they sounded amazing--for 30 seconds. Then they let out a high pitched scream that won't stop. I woke up the whole house, puppies and all... GRRRRRRRRR.... If only I had read this review at Amazon... or the Klipsch forums where folks are venting on the Klipsch folks--and NO ONE FROM Klipsch seems to be listening!!! Ummm... hey guys are Klipsch... if you're going to blog and put up forums you might want to interact with your customers! Anyone has any ideas for great speakers for my computer? [ Note: As with all customer service problems, it is bestthat bloggers link to each other, write thing up on Consumerist, and post to delicious so that the customer support people get the clue when they see a bad review on their Google SERP. ]Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments
A lot of folks have been asking me about Google "slamming" sites over the past week for selling paid links and/or *perhaps* cross-linking between blogs/blog networks. [ Note: I put slamming in quotes for a reason.. if "slamming" means making the Google index better, well, that's just fine with me. ]As many folks have pointed out, I essentially came up with the the concept of interlinking a blog network. Of course, that idea came out of the concept of a blogroll which I did NOT create. Let me give some background on what I'm talking about.When we started Weblogs, Inc. we wanted to create 100 blogs that would help each other through shared infrastructure. That infrastructure included things like software, sales, and marketing. Marketing came in the form of three devices:a) the "ad slice" unit at the top of the page. This was a thin line that I came up with to alert folks to breaking items around the network. I thought of it like a ticket symbol. It worked really well and it's used allover the Internet today. b) the second unit was the blogroll which, obviously, I had nothing to do with creating.c) the "WIN grid" which was a table at the bottom of ever blog that showed a half dozen Weblogs, Inc. blogs and the last three headlines from each. It worked well and almost every blogged network has stolen borrowed it. Now, NONE of these units were created for SEO purposes. In fact, we never tracked search engine traffic since it was such a small percentage of our traffic in the early days (like five percent... really). Over time the search traffic grew and folks assumed that we created these unit to create links between blogs--nothing could be further from the truth. We made these units so we could promote the stuff we were working on. Engadget users would love Joystiq and HackADay we thought, so why syndicate some headlines. My thinking on this was like NBC promoting CNBC and Bravo... or ABC promoting Disney. Just an obvious way to get your product out there to people who might be interested in it. It had zero to do with SEO. In fact, nothing we did at Weblogs, Inc. we SEO related... we were just too busy to focus on SEO because we were growing so fast, selling so many ads, hiring so many bloggers, and trying to keep the servers up and running. Really. Additionally, folks started requesting to buy links on our side bar so we came up with adunits similar to Google's ads and placed them on the sidebar. Over time we learned folks were doing this for SEO reasons and we discontinued the program. Tim O''Reilly had a similar issue with his blog network with the same paid text link buyer. Anyway, Google is justified in dropping the page rank of sites if they think they are gaming the system and sites need to make a decision if they want to work with Google or not. I suggest working with them. The folks at Google are good people and I'm sure they don't want to make good sites suffer. They just want to make better result for their users, so I support their efforts to fight paid links. It's a good idea for everyone.*If* I was running Weblogs, Inc. and the blogs got dinged I would reach out to Google and ask what we could do to correct the problem and just do it. Engadget and Autoblog are the definitive blogs on the internet for gadgets and autos (based on traffic alone) and to punish them does not serve the users of Google or Engadget/Autoblog. My guess is AOL will find out from Google what is going on and resolve it and all will be good in the world again. If the cross-marketing techniques we came up with are confusing search engine I don't see any problem with removing them. At the end of the day Google, Engadget, and Autoblog are all boats in the same ocean... they rise an fall together. I'm sure they will work it out.Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments
Mahalo is turning out to be a very fun place to work. We eat lunch together four days a week at a 30 foot long table, we play basketball together, and we've got a writers group every Monday night.The How To group has started doing some food articles. Last month after a lunch debate about deep fried coca-cola, candy, and pizza they decided they would put the recipes to the test. They bought a fryer and every FRYday they fry something.... this week they deep fried... wait for it... bacon. Oh yeah, they made a video. Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments
Brian Alvey's Online Comic Book collection continues to grow!My favorite is Grim Jack.... well worth checking out!GrimJackEZ StreetBlack IceRead more free online comic books available only at ComicMix.Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments
Mahalo Guides put together a great Tokyo Motor Show page... some great concept cars coming out of the show this year! This is a great example of where humans can make a much better search result than a machine.Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments
AdaptiveBlue is a very cool Firefox plugin that is very Web 3.0 (The Tim O'Reilly version of Web 3.0 that is, the semantic web... as opposed to the Calacanis version of Web 3.0, the "gifted" web :-). Their latest tool, a plugin for bloggers, automatically puts a little icon next to keywords and give users a context popup with a collection or related links. Similar in function to Mahalo, but automated. As you can see above they link to Mahalo when we have a page... which is very cool. Mahalo for that!We have a similar, yet more primitive, version of something similar running for Wordpress the pulls up the Mahalo top seven. The semantic and expert web are coming together and it's going to be VERY powerful.Congrats to our friends at AB for their latest triumph! Fred has some thoughts as well (and that's his image I've hijacked!).Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments
{ photo by Zach }Search Engine Land reports on a study of "search engine fatigue" today. 72.3 percent of Americans experience "search engine fatigue" (either "always," "usually," or "sometimes") when researching a topic on the Internet. 65.4 percent of Americans say they've spent two or more hours in a single sitting searching for specific information on search engines. More than three out of four (75.1 percent) of those who experience search engine fatigue report getting up and physically leaving their computer without the information they were seeking - either "always," "usually" or "sometimes." This is EXACTLY why I was attracted to the search engine space. As great as Google, Yahoo, MSN, and ASK are, people are still suffering with finding high-quality information on the internet. One solution isn't going to solve all these issues, but we've done over 18,000 pages so far at Mahalo, each of which serves at least 20 search terms. Over time we're going to be able to solve the fatigue problem for the first 1/4 to 1/3rd of search terms. If we can do that we will have a really big business that helps a LOT of people--a LOT!StumbleUpon and Delicious are solving the problem with a community of millions of elite bookmarkers, and AdaptiveBlue is doing some great work with semantic work. Really exciting to see other folks confirming what I learned when I did my research on search. In the labs I've watched (yes, we do labs) I've heard this kind of thing over and over again. People GIVE UP after a certain amount of time. Can you imagine that?!?! The problem is so FUBARed that folks are giving up. Crazy.Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments
I've been getting 20-30 speaking offers a month for the past couple of months and I have a really hard time saying no to these things. I think I'm averaging three month, which puts me on track for 30+ this year. I told myself (and my wife) I would do one a month, but it's so hard for me to say no. Especially when it's a student organization or a regional event like ConvergeSouth. Some of my best creative ideas come when I go to networking events, and some of the biggest business deals I've been involved with went down after meeting folks at these kind of events.This weekend I've got back to back speaking gigs at UCLA and USC!StartUpLA, UCLAFireside/Keynote Chat @ 5:25PMUSC Instittueon Entertainment Law and BusinessPanel: How do you make money on the Internet? (right before Barry Diller--who's always a riot/super smart/blunt/entertaining). Anyone out there going to either event?Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments
My SEO pal GreyWolf suggested we move the Guide Note from the right hand column of the page (see above) to the left hand column (see image below) above "The Mahalo Top 7." Ironically, Jon Hicks first design for Mahalo had the Guide note in the left hand column but we moved it to the right hand side because of feedback from our user labs. It seemed that folks skipped past the Guide Note thinking it was an advertisement. We also thought folks would want to get right to the links.However, looking at the two screen shots you can see this is a very difficult decision for us. The Guide Note looks really good in BOTH places. If you're in "search mode" you might want to skip the guide note and prefer it in the right hand column. If you're in the "consume content" mode you might want the Guide Note in the left hand column. Like many decisions when building a web service there is no clear answer... in fact, both answers could be right. So, you're left with a coin toss. We tossed the coin and put the Guide Note on the right, but I'm starting to feel the left hand column. Maybe it is because our Guide Notes are getting better. This would be the THIRD time we've changed my mind on this if we change it again... which I'm totally fine with. I think part of my thinking is based on the fact that the Guide Notes are getting better and better. Left Hand Column Pros/Cons:Pro: Shows off the human element to usersPro: Differentiates us from Google/Yahoo/Ask/MSNPro: Helps educate usersPro: According to Greywolf this will help search engines understand the page (so, SEO reasons)Right Hand Column Pros/Cons:Pro: Gets people to the search results quickerCon: Works against search engine optimizationCon: Some people might think the guide note is an advertisement What do you guys think? Comments are open (please use your real name, be nice, and of course be honest)Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments
