2009-07-03 Fri

02:46 Speeding up: Attracting more visitors with content and community (5381 Bytes) » Inside AdSense

We're well under way with our five-week educational series about speeding up your business in a slowdown, which we kicked off two weeks ago. This week, you'll hear tips from Jack Herrick, the founder of wikiHow.com, about attracting new visitors to your site. As we share more tips over the next two weeks about increasing your revenue potential and attracting more advertiser budget, we hope you'll leave comments with your own suggestions for growing your business. You can also follow the series at www.google.com/ads/speedingup.

Jack Herrick is the founder of wikiHow, a collaborative writing project to build the world's largest, highest quality how-to manual. wikiHow is a wiki, which means that any visitor to the site can create or edit wikiHow articles. wikiHow is currently ranked as the 100th most popular site on the web by Quantcast, and receives over 16 million unique visitors each month. Today, Jack shares three of his favorite tips to attract visitors. We hope they'll help you come up with new ways to entice visitors to your sites as well.

Tip #1: Produce great content

The first tip is obvious, but it's also the most important. The articles on wikiHow vary widely in quality. We have some of the highest quality how-tos on the net, for example How to Hard Boil an Egg, and we also have some fairly ugly, unfinished drafts we call stubs. Interestingly, the high-quality articles don't get just a little more traffic than the mediocre articles, they get hundreds of times more. When you can produce the single best page on the Internet on any given topic, people will find it and share it with their friends. Don't settle for acceptable content, always strive to produce amazing content that your readers can't resist sharing.

Tip #2: Learn to share

My second tip is more counterintuitive. To attract more readers to your website, consider putting your content under a Creative Commons license so it can be widely distributed. Everything on wikiHow is under a license that allows other websites to publish and even modify or adapt our content for re-use on their sites. In fact, we have a button at the bottom of every article that allows webmasters to copy and paste the HTML right onto their site. Many webmasters are afraid to share their content, because they worry they will only be aiding competition. By sharing, what you are really doing is encouraging your competitors to provide free advertising for you. The more people who see your content on other sites, the more likely they are to eventually come straight to you.

Tip #3: Make your community a team

Finally, I'd encourage you to allow real collaboration on your site. Lots of websites try to create online communities. To use a basketball analogy, most online communities are just groups of individuals shooting freethrows alone. On wiki websites, people play together as a real team. Humans are hard wired to want to work in groups and collaborate. By allowing this to happen, you can create a passionate community of people that will build something bigger than any one person could accomplish on their own. And that will in time attract a large audience.

Hopefully Jack's tips will help you come up with some new techniques to attract visitors to your site. In addition to Jack's tips, here are a few extra resources focused on attracting more visitors.

Learn the basics of Search Engine Optimization with Google's SEO guide.
Submit your content so that Google can help you distribute it across Google Web Search, Maps, Product Search, iGoogle, and more.
Drive more traffic to your site with programs like AdWords.

Posted by Talia Brodecki - AdSense Product Marketing

02:46 What to do with special requests (3054 Bytes) » Seth's Blog

The bike shop is busy in June. If you bring your bike in for a tune up, it will cost $39 and take a week.

A week!

What if someone says, "I have a bike trip coming up in three days, can you do it by then?"

At most bike shops, the answer is a shrug, followed by, "I'm sorry, we're swamped."

The problem with telling people to go away is that they go away. And the problem with treating all customers the same is that customers aren't the same. They're different and they demand to be treated (and are often willing to pay) differently.

So, why not smile and say, "Oh, wow, that's a rush. We can do it, but it's expensive. It'll cost you $90. I know that's a lot, but there you go."

Outcome: Maybe they'll still leave. But maybe they'll happily pay you for the privilege of doing business with you. Why should this be your choice, not theirs?

If you do tax accounting for mid-size businesses, why not offer a special last-minute service? A service in which you process shoeboxes filled with unsorted papers? A service that costs less but happens during your slow season?

There are two really good reasons to turn down special requests:

1. because you're marketing yourself as extremely busy and perfectly willing to turn down good work.

2. because you want to market yourself as someone who is a rigid artist, a stick in the mud or a crotchety perfectionist. This works great for pizza places.

02:46 The purpose of a book cover (3134 Bytes) » Seth's Blog

(and I think it works for lots of products)

Is the purpose of the cover to sell books, to accurately describe what's in the book, or to tee up the reader so the book has maximum impact?

The third.

It's the third because if the book has maximum impact, then word of mouth is created, and word of mouth is what sells your product, not the cover.

Tactically, the cover sells the back cover, the back cover sells the flap and by then you've sold the book. If those steps end up selling a book that the purchaser doesn't like, game over. So you have to be consistent all the way through and end up creating a conversation after the purchase. Books are better at creating conversations than most products (when was the last time you talked about a pool cue), but there's lots of opportunity here, no matter what you make.

Some ways that a book cover can accomplish its mission:

Iconic (because iconic items tend to signal 'important')
Noticeable across the room (you see that lots of other people own it, thus making it likely that you'll want to know why)
Sophisticated (because this helps reinforce that the ideas inside are worthy of your time)
Original (why bother reading a book you already know)
Clever
Funny
Generic (reminding you of a genre or another book you liked, not generic as in boring)

I don't know about you, but I judge books by their cover every day.

02:46 关于“群”的那些破事 (5827 Bytes) » 云风的 BLOG

在 QQ 增加所谓“群” 这个功能之前，我就不用 qq 了。（所以找我要 qq 号的朋友不要再问了）

但是“群”这个讨厌的东西，总是阴魂不散的游荡在我的网络世界里。

今天在 twitter 上看见 Fenng 说 “我真受不了我可爱的同事们了，你们就不能不用"群"啊? 这是 IM 工具最烂的一个设计。除了浪费时间，还能干什么?” ，真是心有戚戚啊。

当然，人和人对事物的看法见解是不一样的。物以类聚、人以群分吧。我还真见过真心喜爱“群”的同学，大体上和 xmpp 同学以及Fenng 随后的发言一致。虽然分享“小笑话、新闻链接、有趣的小图片” 我觉得应该属于 google reader 的事情，

popo 作为网易内部交流工具，当初设计群的时候，我是发过言的。情况大致是这样：

一开始，dingdang 认为 popo 没有一个专门做产品的人，都是程序员自己在想应该怎样怎样。这样是做不好产品的。姑且不论程序员主导开发好或不好。我当时也是很赞同应该有人专门去考虑 popo 作为一个产品应该怎么制作和发展的。

IM 是个不错的东西，（虽然我个人更喜欢 email）。应该好好做。我那段时间跟 popo 的人聊的很多。这大约是 03/04 年的事情。

我是很反对增加“群”这个东西的。但是据说“用户”很需要。虽然我一直都觉得，不要听用户的，但是，做一个类似但更好的东西是有必要的。

更早一点，大约是 02 年。当时 popo 组的负责人黄（后来去做飞信的那位兄弟）曾经问我，除了游戏和 IM 我们还可以做点什么？我想了一下说，个人意见是：互联网上最需要的还是人和人的沟通。但不局限于 IM 。从那时起我就在想，到底我们需要一种怎样的沟通工具，可以让更多的人发出的有用的信息方便的聚集到自己这里。

所以、在 popo 增加群功能前，我把自己的想法写了几千字，希望可以做一个更好的“群”。不过 popo 组的人最终拒绝了我的提案。因为很难跟用户解释。用户没有见过这样的东西，而“群”已经深入人心，只要做一个一样的，就至少不会错了。

记得当时我们争论的问题还有类似的许多。比如到底是否存在一种最好的信息组织方式。用户的行为能不能引导。比如说，我坚持，搜索是一种比分类更好的方式，只要适当引导，用户会更偏向前者；但是反对的声音是，有人天生就热衷与自己分类，大类分小类的分下去；搜索只会让信息更乱。（所以、popo 差点就在好友管理中加入树状分类结构，最终只是程序和 UI 设计人员觉得麻烦而没能实施）

话说回来、当时我的建议归结起来很简单：就是类似 twitter 的方式。每个人的消息不要有准确的接收者，而是尽可能的广播出去。在消息里加入适当的关键词。（类似 twitter 的 @ 和 # ）。而后，接收者自己选择过滤出自己感兴趣的信息。

作为 IM ，还可以针对特定消息随时展开聊天室讨论。讨论的过程可以全文从 web 上查阅历史。从这点上有点点类似于后来出现的贴吧。就是以某个主题为线索展开，而不是以固定的人群，固定的聊天室。这也是对需要闲聊扯谈的人的一个满足。

时隔五年，现在这些概念相对好解释的多。因为现在我们有了 twitter 有了 facebook google reader …… 而用户，接收了它们。但我还记得当年，花了两个小时，才给一个人解释清楚我想要的是什么。而他在听完之后的第一反应是：高频率的广播消息？用户会受不了的。

后来、群的功能被加上。如同 qq 的 clone 。

如我所料、在群的忠实用户之外，还有一群如我一样的用户，即使被加入了群，也几乎不去查看群的信息。久而久之、许多群已经失去了当初设计他的人希望达到的功能。（当然，作为 clone 产品，我们需要的并不是考虑为用户带来点什么、也不必要去希望达到什么功能，而是考虑如何 clone 的跟本体一样就行了）

又过了几年，终于公司内部发通知，要求员工上班不得使用群。（虽然部分所谓工作群除外，但事实上否定了群的意义）

本质上，网易是个不愿意创新的公司，这点几乎写到了骨头里。不过这也不算坏事。这样，公司的发展更为稳重、少犯错误。我也不因此抱怨。即使脑子里总会蹦出些新奇的想法，但不至于冲动的立刻去干，在这样的环境下，会有更多的时间思考。因为、大部分新想法其实是不切实际的。

哦，我说的是“创”新。对于被验证过好的新事物，公司还是跟的很紧的。比如，gmail 刚内部测试放号的时候，我弄了一个玩。立刻惊叹于基于 ajax 的 web mail 可以这样好用。当天晚上就跟丁说，我们的 web email 系统也应该这样做。然后没多久，163 的 email 就更新了。老板推动的事情总是很积极的 :) 。

btw, 我们的 popo pidgin 插件已经可以收发群消息了。需要的同事去 sf checkout 代码自己编译使用。

2009-07-02 Thu

23:19 【树洞】20090703 (5191 Bytes) » 槽边往事

根据来信者的要求，隐去了她的ID，权且称她为R好了。R来信说：

考虑了很久，还是决定说出来。

在我22岁的时候无可救药地爱上了一个人，也可以说是单恋。当我意识到的时候才注意到他是有妇之夫，可我还是一如既往不求回报的苦恋。我不知道自己是个什么类型的人，只是不能接受没有感情的婚姻，那时有人给介绍条件不错的对象，我都拒绝，因为我不想骗别人，与他人做一个同床异梦的夫妻，更是因为心理有逃不开的恐惧：每想到和一个自己不爱的人做着性事就无法忍受。这次单恋用去了我最美丽的十年年华，我真的不知道自己想干什么，我从没想过要破坏人家的婚姻。这次单恋到了第十个年头，我终于鼓足勇气向那人表白，也许他对自己的婚姻有所淡漠，也许平时他也愿意和我交流，他接受了我。可我是个害羞的人，而且出于道德观念和环境限制，几乎和他没有什么肌肤接触，这段感情在我发现他和我的好朋友有猫腻的时候突然消失了，一干二净。这次经历不是我想说的，只是做个引子。

在第一次恋爱的时候，我以为自己只能有一次真爱，离开他后我以为自己今后不可能再爱上别人。

在我接近40岁的时候，有一个已婚之夫通过短信和我的关系渐近，我开始没有意识到他的意思，后来也是通过短信他向我表白，他的幽默让我又有了感觉，开始我拒绝了他，但真实的感觉不能骗自己，而且我想自己已经年纪不小，一生不能连个真正的恋爱也没谈过。（也许这个也不能称为真正的恋爱，毕竟不是正当的。）那时我就知道自己会被感情所累，也曾像是预言地说：我会被你害死的。就这样我又一次陷进了第三者的角色里，但没有想过要取代他的妻子，只是由着自己的感觉走。有时候我胡思乱想，是不是上辈子我欠了哪位情债，这生要给我一个惩罚：越想得到一个真爱越不让我得到真真实实的情爱生活？爱是盲目的，心里明白不能这样做，但又无法摆脱只能爱上有妇之夫的命运。从与他的接触中感觉到他对我是真心的，我们在二年的时间里有了几次肌肤之亲，通过QQ和他有了几次裸聊。我之所以能与他走到这一步，是想让自己今生不能错过做女人的机会，40岁了我才破处，让人知道了我都觉得自己不正常。在交往的二年时间里，他的妻子有所觉查，去年5月的时候，因为不正当关系让我感觉痛苦和不安，下定决心离开了他。

世上没有不透风的墙，从开始我就有此思想准备。但我没想到的是和他绝交快一年了，他妻子突然跑到办公室来质问了我，原来她发现了我的裸照。当时他要我的裸照的时候我就千叮呤万嘱咐，千万千万要删除，我可不想学阿娇。我没想到的是他瞒着我留着它，出于对他的了解，考虑到他的需求，我并不怪他。该来的总会来，该受惩罚的就让我受吧。她说她审问了他，他招供了和我的几次暧昧关系，家里人和他的亲属都知道了，又威胁我要放出裸照让我难堪。我低三下四地求她放过我，当时我该承认的都承认了，也把自己已和他断交近一年的情况说明了，她虽然气愤也没有很闹，我很感激她，我问她我的裸照该如何处理，她当时说只要你不再和我老公来往就不贴出来。

平常我和她不很碰面，我以为只要我遵守和她的协议就可以平安，虽然有时想起来心是有所忐忑（毕竟人家掌握着我的生死，一但裸照流出我该多糗），但我的心态调整得还可以，日子总得过下去。今天我和她碰到了一起，我仍是小心地和她做了正常的工作交谈，但她话里带话地讥讽我，越说越明显，言词不断故意挑衅：手指点着我说这人不是东西，你看她就不敢反驳我，你们不知道她做些什么，不要把我的名字和她放到一起等等。我感觉到羞耻，我躲开了，我不想钻地缝，我宁愿死也不想受此辱。可我毕竟有理智，我怎么能这样死呢。照她这个样子就是死她也不会放过我，仍然会和别人说死得活该，谁让她勾引我老公。我生死都要受此辱我还有什么怕的？

回家后我哭了很久，后静静地想了一想，我诚心地给她发了一条短信，希望她能放过我，我想这是我最后一次低三下四求人，如果她仍然这样羞辱我，我只能以死相抵。

写到这吧，如果有人能给我想个万全之策，我万分感激。

菜头：如果你想发到你的树洞里，求你不要写出我的网名，给我留点面子，因为如果我有机会好好生活，我还想经常来看你的博客，谢谢！

22:36 美国旅行手册 (2853 Bytes) » 王建硕

其实不是手册，而是仅仅写给我自己的，方便下次。

美国旅行三宝

护照，驾照，信用卡，缺一不可。有了它们，其他都不重要了。

身份证不带，没问题。驾照其实不用翻译件，最近几次Avis的人总是像模像样的比对驾照上的中文和预定记录，我真不信他们看得懂中文。美金现金应该带上几十块钱。最近三次在硅谷都是只有信用卡没有现金，唯一的问题是付不出打扫房间一块钱的小费。邀请信好像最近的五六次都没有带过，正常过关。

出发

UA858早上9点半，提前三个小时出发最合适。在机场吃早餐，有免费无线网，一个小时正好看一下关于约会的最新邮件。出租车头一点晚上强生出租6258000叫好，第二天很方便。

飞机

一定提前三天美联航Easy Check-in定好去程靠窗座位，回程靠走道座位。因为去程途径日本的风景很好，降落旧金山的风景也不错，其他就是黑夜，靠窗睡觉没有问题。回来一直白天，时间更长，还是远离窗户睡觉好。

飞机上眼罩和耳塞一定要，太帮忙了。口罩这次没有用。尽量睡觉，一定要睡觉。

旧金山机场

确认使用Avis Preferred，省去几分钟时间，下飞机直接开车就走，不需要和任何人说话。酒店地址一定写在本子上，记住US-101哪个出口就行。

倒时差

对于和我一样睡不醒的人，千万别听老套的坚持白天不睡的教导。我的做法：提前看好最近的越南面馆。放下行李，直接开车吃七块钱的面，然后回来睡觉。从上午11点睡到晚上八点，起来随便吃晚饭，然后接着睡觉到第二天早上6-7点，时差基本上就差不多了。之后当早上起来变得异常痛苦而不是神采奕奕的爬起来的时候，就是时差已经过去了。

约会

提前三天一定全部约好，而且要详细到餐馆或者咖啡厅，至少也是街口。否则临时安排几乎不可能。

还有什么吗？以后想起来就记下来。

P.S. 今天没有办法，下午2点有个会，所以没有睡好。直接后果是因为时差原因打了盹，迟到40分钟。因为开会的地方在Stanford旁边，在Stanford散了会儿步，看到草坪上的学生的活动，羡慕不已，一冲动到斯坦福大学书店买了个橄榄球，带回去中午在交大草坪上玩。

好了，睡了，倒时差去了。

原文：http://home.wangjianshuo.com/cn/20090703_ce.htm

20:25 陈二雷 (570 Bytes) » 玉面飞龙的BLOG

最近又热播了一出战争题材的连续据，我的兄弟叫顺溜，风格和”我的团长我的团”类似，嬉笑怒骂型的战争戏剧。王宝强在里面主演神枪手陈二雷。演得还不错，王宝强在战争片里面是大有突破，游刃有余。推荐每晚追看。

最近国内再次上调石油价格，这样可以或多或少的减少石油消费，从而减少排气量，对气温和环境有好处。我是大大支持的。持续的高温实在让人憋闷。我没有车，不骂娘。

19:01 Onsite and Remote - getting best of both worlds (8788 Bytes) » MySQL Performance Blog

At Percona we provide services both Onsite - visiting the customers and Remote - logging in to their systems or communicating via email,phone,instant messaging.

We believe both approaches have their benefits and drawbacks and mixing them right way allows you to get your problems solved most efficient way.

Onsite visits are great as they allow consultant to meet your team in person and great for relationship building. It is great for architecture design and review as you can sit down with the team and use drawing board. It also often allows the best focus both for consultant and for participating team - when consulting visit is arranged it is usually the top priority for some of the staff members which provide consultant with information and assistance he might need.

Onsite visits also often allow to get prompt attention from other team - looking for network engineer to understand network topology or for someone from marketing to get the growth plans - they typically can be brought in for question.

I believe Onsite visits also offer unmatched training experience for the team - one of the team members can work side by side with consultants observing what he does and asking the question about the progress.

The Single Day visits are often extremely valuable as a kick off to do application redesign, for performance review or for starting long term Remote DBA or support relationships. They can be done with little planning as basically for any system there is enough work to spend efficiently understanding the system and working on the pressing problems customer may have. Such visits are often result in a lot of “homework” as application changes or implementing changes on production which when can benefit from remote followups to validate changes and provide further advice.

Multi day onsite visits require a bit more planning to be efficient. Many times in my career I would come to the customer for a week only to find I have created the implementation plan within 1-2 days and it will take a while to implement it and pass it through development and testing stages. Before long onsite visit it is very good to have a call with consultant to understand what exactly needs to be done, how much time and what resources it requires.

Projects which can be efficient as multi day visits are whenever implementation is required (coding unlike giving advice takes a lot of time) - migration projects, any forms of scripting, implementation (writing queries), hands on setting up MySQL, Replication, Monitoring, High Availability with MMM or DRBD are good examples.

Another good example of efficient Multi-Day visit is when there are multiple groups or multiple applications using MySQL - in such case each of the problem areas/groups can gets its own day or few hours which keeps consultant busy.

To make a Multi-Day visit efficient it is important to plan on what will be done - what people will consultant need to work with and which problems do they have. Providing proper access and having staging/test systems available are also often required.

Remote work has a benefit of consultant being available in the short time intervals and being able to multi task.

Working with the customer there are two types of “waits” which are often encountered. First - waiting on the customer. It could be fixing access problems, completing application changes, QA, scheduling downtime to implement changes and millions of other things. Second - waiting on database (or other) operations to complete - backup, restore, ALTER TABLE, load testing - all of these things take time and make consultant to wait for them.

In case you’re working remotely consultant typically has other tasks to do while such long processes are running. If you’re spending time onsite you may have other tasks or you may not while if you’re working remotely there are always things to do.

Another benefit of remote work - it truly allows to engage the team. If you have consultant onsite getting another one with some specific knowledge is complicated while getting another person to login to the system remotely for a quick look is easy and efficient.

Time is another interesting factor - onsite visits usually happen during office hours while changes to production are often avoided. With remote work it is much easier to do work which needs to be done at night hours.

Remote work however also needs to be well organized. The benefit of onsite work is - it is always planned at very specific time. Given date and time consultant will be there so both consultant and customer prepare for the visit. If appointment is just a phone call or online meeting there is larger chance it can be forgotten by ether party. In many cases the remote work not planned to the specific time at all which can cause it to be delayed because of either party delays.

If you need something to be done fast and you’re doing it remotely make sure to plan it to exact time and make sure there is someone to assist consultant if he needs any help such as access issues, some questions about setup or what exactly given queries are doing. Prompt responses can keep the ball rolling much faster.

Another trick to make remote work successful is to be very clear in your instructions especially if you’re not going to be available to assist consultant when he is doing the work. As remote work is often done cross time zones this becomes a very important factor.

In case you have a lot of work done in such “disconnected” mode it is a good idea to have daily/weekly/or be-weekly (depending on project intensity) calls to get team to discuss the progress and generally get team on the same page.

In general surprisingly a lot of things can be done in completely remote mode - we’ve done not only basic optimizations but architecture redesigns, large scale deployment, migrations and high available architectures implementation such a way often surprising customers (in a good way) of how little customers the work took.

The Great Mix As I mentioned before mixing Onsite and Remote work can be indeed the best mix especially for the complex projects. Onsite visit is great to setup relationships, get initial understanding of the system and get initial project planning. After it is done a lot of work can be done remotely quite efficient while there may be the benefit in onsite status-checks and team interactions as well.

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17:59 Scaling w Flash Webinar Recording Available (2442 Bytes) » MySQL Performance Blog

The Scaling with Flash webinar I’ve mentioned earlier was a success and we got the recording available. It contains Percona presentation, presentation of Schooner appliances and Q&A session. Enjoy.

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16:21 Braid - 时空幻境 | 小众软件 > 游戏 (6353 Bytes) » 小众软件

Braid 是一款动作解谜平台游戏，曾经在 2006 年 IGF 独立游戏节（Independent Games Festival）获得过最佳设计奖。因此，它并不是一款非常新的游戏。LeON，爱月，六分仪，zkalous 等等童鞋老早就向我推荐了。再不介绍，估计火星这个词已经不能形容其火星程度了。@appinn

Braid 的剧情相当囧：拯救公主。不过，画面和音乐非常棒！其创意的地方是：利用各个世界里稀奇古怪的时间流动方式来解谜。游戏难度很大，非常杀脑细胞，@sfufoet 我只玩了第一个世界，已经玩到想砸键盘了，然后我就删除了。

pic via

怎么说都是抽象的，来看看官方演示视频吧：

P.S. 这些官方的下载链接都是演示版（DEMO），请搜索 Demo 字样，找到的链接就是下载地址。游戏一共有 7 个世界，DEMO 版可以让你玩 5 个世界。卡住了请用 Braid 时空幻境视频攻略进行搜索。

update: DemoJameson 说道

@sfufoet “Braid 的剧情相当囧：拯救公主。”这只是表面的剧情，可以说是制作者向蘑菇兄弟致敬的一种方式，其实“Braid描述了“拼命追逐一个难以实现的目标”的过程，以及为此付出的代价，同时也讲述了核武器的问题。”建议大家玩过后看看剧情分析。

原帖：http://www.gamefaqs.com/console/xbox360/file/943284/53842
翻译：http://game1.ali213.net/viewthread.php?tid=2689301