Jim Lejeal is a very successful entrepreneur who I really admire. He’s done countless VC rounds with a few different companies, so he really knows the ins & outs from the entrepreneur side. He makes it look effortless – every now and then I’ll see a press release about another deal he’s done – but it turns out even Jim has to put up with his share of frustrations. Thanks for sharing, Jim.
Paul Graham just posted a new essay about PR. I wrote him an email with the comment below, then decided to post it here.
Paul excerpted the following as an example of plain-jane mainstream newspaper writing, which he later contrasts with the more authentic voice of many bloggers:
Joshua Schachter used to be a lot like the rest of us online. When he surfed the Web, he’d zip through interesting articles only to find that days later he couldn’t remember where he had seen the stories or sites that had caught his interest.
I went to Northwestern, which has a top-notch print program. Every journalism major had to go through Basic Writing, a grueling class that teaches you to crank out an incredible amount of articles in a very short period of time in a format that the mainstream newspapers prefer – i.e. the example above.
The Daily Northwestern newspaper was, as you might expect, staffed mostly by journalism majors. Which means it was incredibly dull to read. The only interesting writing was the weekend section, which was written by people who were into the arts and music, not necessarily journalism per se.
Nonetheless they were probably heavily influenced by PR. I once interned at an alternative record label, and our single biggest expense was mailing out freebie records (this was right before CDs became ubiquitous), often to college newspapers.
Just posted on my Click Thru Stats blog – a free e-book on the the Business Case for RSS.
I need to get an oil change. I remember seeing a sign near a local Midas Muffler offering four oil changes for $60. But I wanted to call them and verify what that included. So I searched on “Midas Muffle Boulder.” The first result was “Local Results for midas muffler boulder” and took me to the page below – exactly the information I wanted. (There’s more after this screen shot.)
Just for grins I decided to search on “oil change boulder,” and I got the screen below. Unbelievable!
A classic from PostSecret.com.
Noted writer Dave Taylor (who also happens to be my friend and business partner) is running the Blog Smart workshop on May 5 in Boulder, Colorado. If you’re ready to learn how business blogging can change your company, saving you money on marketing while increasing visibility and gaining additional sales, this is a great place to start. Dave has authored close to twenty books and runs several successful blogs, including The Intuitive Life and AskDaveTaylor (which was part of the inspiration for AskDerekScruggs).
Remember Googlezon? I think it’s right on schedule. MacWorld reported today that Google is “delivering factual answers for some queries at the top of its results page, to save users from having to navigate over to other sites and look for the information.”
Here are a couple of examples:
This is very clever engineering, but you have to think this will trigger a copyright lawsuit somewhere down the road.