An author of a romance novel spurred fading sales by making personal appearances at book clubs.

Shors is the author of “Beneath A Marble Sky,” a romantic novel about the building of the Taj Mahal. The book got decent reviews, but didn’t sell much until he added a note to the paperback edition. “I came up with the idea of putting the letter in the back of the paper back, with my e-mail address, and inviting book clubs to invite me to their evenings,” Shors explains. That was 200 book clubs ago.

The authors of “WorldChanging: Tools, Models and Ideas for Building a Bright Green Future” tried to hack the publishing system by getting people to buy the book at Amazon at exactly the same time. The goal: Make it the number one book, if just for one day.

It is possible for a relatively small number of people to time their purchases right and, for a short period of time, drive the book they wish to support up the charts…every other bookseller, reviewer, producer and store manager will hear about Worldchanging, and our odds of getting the traction we need to bring worldchanging ideas into the public debate will dramatically increase.

Did it work? According to one commenter, the book got up to #12 but that’s as high as it went.

News.com

What’s Hot gives a visual snapshot of the 15 newest and most read stories on News.com. The bigger the block, the hotter the story. The brighter the block, the newer the story. Bright yellow means the story was just published.

Archive.org

Each item at Archive.org gets a “batting average” (the percentage of people who downloaded the item after visiting its details page).

Walmart

Walmart’s home page has a revolving slide show of products. The 1-2-3-4 bubbles at the bottom slowly fill up so visitors know how long until the next image is displayed. Jay, who submitted this screen, calls it a “nifty way of giving people who are slow readers an idea of how much time they have for your slideshow, and if they need to pause or not.”

Got an interesting screenshot for Signal vs. Noise? Send the image and/or URL to svn [at] 37signals [dot] com.

YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim on How YouTube Got Viral.

1) related video recommendations
2) one-click emailing to spam a friend about a video
3) more social networking and user interaction tools like video comments
4) an external video player

Re: #4, the external video player did have an amazing impact. In a matter of months, YouTube seemed to go from nowhere to everywhere due to that slick and easy to embed player.

A big reason why the external player was so effective: Play buttons are seductive. When people see one, they instantly know what it does and want to click it.

Similarly, Coudal’s technique of showing showing video toolbar buttons in its Jewelboxing ads is also a great way to attract clicks.

Some more musings on YouTube’s interface:

So, in a space with plenty of big players, but no real successes, how did start-up YouTube manage to get so big, so fast, and why was it successful where other big players were not? It’s the interface, stupid! While the technological and bandwidth barriers to getting video online easily have only just recently ebbed away, YouTube managed to be the first to take advantage of this new opportunity in a way that, quite simply, works.

Harmonization of the interface

Streamlining and harmonizing the interfaces people need to use to get to you makes good sense. YouTube offers a way for its users to search, navigate and mark favourites that each user knows how to do instinctively after the first few times. As Steven Johnson says in his book Interface Culture: “…knowledge becomes second nature to most users because it has a strong spatial component to it…” And so it becomes easier for people to find my videos on YouTube, because they don’t have to learn the user interface of my own website.

Worth noting: Chad Hurley, YouTube co-founder, comes from a design background (he started his career as a graphic designer and worked on PayPal’s logo and its user interface in his pre-YouTube days).

Iterations, focus groups, and failing fast — as seen from a comedic perspective:

Ze Frank discusses his show and says he doesn’t worry about writing things down for it. Instead, he iterates often and lets that process pare the content down to just the good stuff.

I don’t write these shows. I just say them. But I’ve usually said everything 15 times. While I’m doing it, all the extraneous garbage comes out.

The Humor Index discusses movie audience research and shows some of the problems you get when you try to base a product on focus group results. Example: Fart jokes test through the roof but how many people really want an entire movie with nothing but fart jokes?

Flatulence jokes tested really well, too. [“School of Rock” writer Mike] White may have little problem with a certain amount of gross-out humor, but when is too much too much? “Any time someone rips one, the audience goes nuts, and that’s slightly depressing,” White says. “Even when they like it, you’re like, I didn’t make the movie for you. I don’t want the audience to tell me what I want to do. I want them to like it, but I want to lead it.”

The audience still won’t laugh at a joke unless they think it’s funny. I know that because I try out new jokes within my show, I slip some in here and there, and ever since the beginning, I’ve had a one-in-five, or one-in-four ratio. For every four or five I write, one will be good enough to stay in the act, and that’s still true even now…It’s a little awkward, but the only way you can get the new stuff is to go through that. It’s not horrifying, it’s just awkward, and you’re disappointed it didn’t work.

Sound Opinions is a Chicago Public Radio show about rock ‘n roll. The show’s site does a terrific job of bringing the program’s contents to the web with the detailed footnotes that accompany each episode (example). Everything discussed or played is presented and there’s a bevy of links to related content at Amazon, YouTube, Wikipedia, lyric sites, etc.

I recently read that NBA Hall of Famer Dave Cowens left the Celtics mid-season one year to go drive a cab (he was suffering burnout and took the time to “clear his head”). That story reminded me of two tales of internet vets who left the industry to work decidely different jobs:

Frank Duff wrote A Coder in Courierland.

Once upon a time, I was a coder not unlike yourself. My day consisted of coffee, perl and java hacking, meetings, and e-mail. I had a cubicle with fluorescent lighting, my own bookshelf and two computers. And I traded it all in…

I can easily say that couriering is the best job i have ever had (and I have more than a few eclectic jobs on my resume). It is fun, the people are friendly, the stress is almost non-existent, it keeps you in excellent shape, and you spend most of your time outside (although this isn’t really a year-round plus in Toronto). And, even considering the fact that my pay as a courier is between half and two thirds what it was as a coder, it is a rare day that I seriously consider going back.

Scott Heiferman, now CEO of Meetup, wrote i was a 20-something dethroned dotcom ceo that went to work the counter at  mcdonald’s.

i spend a lot of time with bankers, lawyers, internet freaks, corporate wonks, and other people living strange lives.  as a good marketing guy, that’s a bad thing.  and as a practicing anti-consumerist, that’s a bad thing.  i got a job at mcdonald’s to help get back in touch with the real world.  also, after over 6 grueling years in the internet whirlwind, i wanted to experience a profitable, well-oiled, multi-billion-dollar machine. and  i deserved a break today…

i’ve been taught countless times the value of a leader/manager showing appreciation for people’s effort.  however, my instinct has often been that showing appreciation really isn’t too necessary for good people.  they just take pride in a job well done — and, anyway, they can read my mind and see the appreciation.  well, from day 1 at mcdonald’s, i was yearning for someone there to say “thanks”.  even a “you’re doing ok” would suffice.  but, no.  neither management experience — nor reading about management — teaches this lesson as well as being an under-appreciated employee.

In the final part of this chat, our guests discuss business models, companies they admire, influences, and businesses that don’t exist but should. (See part 1 or part 2.)

Choice quotes
Hedlund: “I just want to have a really clear and likely story for how money will show up. Step two can’t be "and then some magic happens"

Fletcher: “If you don’t have an audience, it doesn’t really matter what your biz model is.”

Hedlund: “I do think that the #1 thing that has helped me most is having and keeping friends who are talented.”

Hedlund: “Trust your gut more. When you read everyone in the newspaper saying one thing and your gut says something else, burn the newspaper.”

A clever yoga center straw.

This image for Penn & Teller is a nifty representation of the duo. The ampersand, usually a throw away character, becomes the star here with elements that match the performers’ personalities. The fat, curvy, loud part of it evokes Penn perfectly while the quiet little extender fits Teller to a tee.

(Aside: Where does the phrase “fit to a tee” come from? A couple of theories.)

If you dig this sort of witty design, check out the book A Smile in the Mind. It’s a neat resource for playful, creative design.

This book explores witty thinking — the most entertaining area of graphic design. Witty thinking is playfulness with ideas, words playing against images, unexpected connections prompting new insights. It is clever thinking, not funny drawing.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, author of “Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience,” describes flow as “being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you’re using your skills to the utmost.”

Csikszentmihalyi’s ideas on flow stemmed from his attempt to discover a path to happiness. He wanted to figure out “how to live life as a work of art, rather than as a chaotic response to external events.”

“Flow” & Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi discusses what it feels like to be in flow:

• Completely involved, focused, concentrating – with this either due to innate curiosity or as the result of training.
• Sense of ecstasy – of being outside everyday reality.
• Great inner clarity – knowing what needs to be done and how well it is going.
• Knowing the activity is doable – that the skills are adequate, and neither anxious or bored.
• Sense of serenity – no worries about self, feeling of growing beyond the boundaries of ego – afterwards feeling of transcending ego in ways not thought possible.
• Timeliness – thoroughly focused on present, don’t notice time passing.
• Intrinsic motivation – whatever produces “flow” becomes its own reward.

So how do you get there? Wikipedia’s entry on the subject says the following conditions help:

• Clear goals (expectations and rules are discernable).
• A high degree of concentration on a limited field of attention (a person engaged in the activity will have the opportunity to focus and to delve deeply into it).
• Direct and immediate feedback (successes and failures in the course of the activity are apparent, so that behavior can be adjusted as needed).
• Balance between ability level and challenge (the activity is neither too easy nor too difficult).
• A sense of personal control over the situation or activity.
• The activity is intrinsically rewarding, so there is an effortlessness of action.

Group environment matters too. A couple of flow friendly space attributes:

• Creative spatial arrangements: Chairs, pin walls, charts, however no tables, therefore primarily work in standing and moving.
• Playground design: Charts for information inputs, flow graphs, project summary, craziness, safe place (people can say what is usually only thought), result wall, and open topics.

Enemies of flow include fearing what other people think…

A major constraint on people enjoying what they are doing is always being conscious of a fear of how they appear to others and what these others might think. Ecstasy includes rising above these constraining concerns of the ego.

...and mundane daily routines.

Stepping outside of normal daily routines is an essential element…This might be obtained through diverse routes or activities, such as reading a novel or becoming involved in a film.

It’s the content, not the icons, my rant on social bookmarking icons at blogs, generated some interesting responses.

Effective icon usage
A few commenters challenged my flimsy evidence that icons aren’t effective — a fair complaint since my research, a quick scan of popular listings at Digg and Technorati, wasn’t exactly Woodward/Bernstein caliber. Others offered some traffic success stories…

Pete Ottery: “Yes, multitudes of these icons on every site everywhere gets tired real quick – but for us at news.com.au we decided to trial a few select ones at the bottom of articles (example). Informal number checking suggests there’s about 10 times more stories from news.com.au being posted on digg now since those buttons were placed there. (maybe 5 a week pre buttons, 50 a week immediately after buttons being placed.)”

Gina Trapani: “Actually, Lifehacker’s traffic has gone through the roof since we started placing the digg button on select featured posts. We go in and out of the Technorati top 10 regularly (at number 11 right now.) Forgive me if this sounds like horn-tooting. I bring it up only because you asked for evidence. Here it is. That said, we add the button by hand on only one post a day, our featured original content article, the one we want to promote most heavily. I agree that all those icons on every post is pretty ugly and generally ineffective.”

Note that both of these methods use a more restrained approach then the scattershot technique I was discussing (i.e. blogs that feature a laundry list of icons at the bottom of multiple posts on a single page). Moderate use of icons is a lot different then a smack-you-in-the-face-over-and-over approach.

I want vs. they want
Some of the comments also reminded me of the timeless challenge facing web site owners: balancing what you want vs. what your visitors want.

People who defended the usage of icons seemed to fixate on what they want from their site.

3spots: “Personally I’ve added them for several reasons: -For myself. (well I’ve mixed them up with other tools.) -To show which SBs I like. + By curiosity, even if there aren’t much users, to see which ones are the most used, how, why…”

Ben Edwards: “Maybe having the icon there adds just 5% more to the people who would Digg an article. Don’t you think that 5% is worth it to people trying to get a greater readership?”

I wonder if these “I want” arguments are being adequately measured against what “they want” though. The view from the visitor’s side often takes on a different shade…

Ben Darlow: “Every time I see a site that has a digg counter or ‘digg this’ link on its articles, my immediate thought is ‘Whore.’”

Bill: “As a Reddit user, I have to say that when submitting a link to a blog post or news article I’ve stumbled across, the ONLY important thing is the quality of the content…I’ve never clicked on one of these buttons – I mean, how arrogant can you get.”