I loved this post by Charlie Hoehn, who works with Tim Ferris, on how they marketed Tim’s book.  Tim’s blog is well-known for his indepth posts, and this is one to print and refer back to anytime you think about doing a product launch or relaunch.

It’s long, so I’m going to just link to it here.  It’s mostly about marketing, but there are some nuggets about how Tim “manages” Charlie that are also awesome lessons.

12 Lessons Learned While Marketing “The 4-Hour Body”

I just read an interesting blog post, and decided to leave a comment.

My comment was really good (yes, I’m biased).  It was highly relevant, and helpful to the blogger as well as to her readers.

When I hit submit, I was prompted to login to (a) wordpress, or (b) gravatar.

I don’t have a wordpress account that I use, so I tried to login with my gravatar account.  I haven’t done this for, oh, years.  Since I set up the account.

I got an error message, prompting me to try again.

But here’s the sad truth: by this time, I was done.  I had lost interest in making this work.  Even thought the comment was good, and would have helped increase the credibility of the blog and blogger, I was done.  I closed the tab, moved on to the 50 other things I try and do before my workday starts.

Would the blogger have wanted and appreciated the comment?  I’m sure.  Bloggers want comments like addicts want ________.  It helps validate them as a blogger.

But the blogger made it too hard for me to leave a comment.

If you have a blog, logout and try and comment on one of your posts.  If it is not stupid-easy (that is, fill in the comment, your name, email addy and your URL, and that’s it!!), then you are making it too hard.

Check out this awesome post: Marc Andreessen Visits Peter Thiel’s Stanford Class To Talk Startups, How He Invests & The Future

It’s a long read, but meaty, juicy, and overall inspiring.  I love it.

I have an undergrad and MBA.  I’m glad I’m done with school since now I can study what I want.  Here’s a new “category” on this blog about how I’m continuing my education.

I’m completely taken by Lynda.com.  You can read how successful they are on this TechCrunch post: Smart Education: How Lynda.com Hit $70M In Revenue Without A Penny From Investors

I don’t think I’d ever heard of Lynda.com before.  But since I read about it I’ve had a number of Lynda.com pages up on my browser.  I could spend 20+ hours studying what they are doing.

Here are two pages that have captured me:

The Benefits page: http://www.lynda.com/aboutus/Benefits.aspx  I love how they laid this out and I think I’m going to borrow some stuff from here.  Don’t worry Lynda, we’re not competing.  I love how simple this page is.

The “about us” videos, which is from a keynote she did… broken down to short clips.  I LOVE the stories: http://www.lynda.com/lynda-com-Presents-tutorials/thelynda-comstory/61213-2.html

Freaking awesome.

I just finished an awesome article about how the iPad app was developed for LinkedIn.  This was particular intriguing to me because we’re continually asked about a smartphone app for JibberJobber (go to m.JibberJobber.com to get to the mobile interface).

What I’ve said is that we’re collecting feedback, and as we get that we’ll get closer to deciding whether we need to do native smartphone apps.  Personally, I don’t want to do it.

Even if we were a huge company, creating and maintaining (and maintaining some more) native apps for the iPhone, Android, etc., and all of their whimsical changes (these are operating systems, so any core changes they make can be cause for a complete redesign/recoding of a native app).

In the article, it says that most of the iPad app is actually web-driven.  In other words, as far as I understand, it’s not an offline app… it has a few things that are native to the device, but pulls most of the data from the web.

Technology is a beautiful thing, and as a former developer, if this is the direction we’re headed (away from native apps and towards web-apps that look/feel/function like they are native), we’re headed in an awesome direction.

One can only hope!

Note: I have an iPad… but haven’t even cared to get the iPad app for LinkedIn.  I don’t do LinkedIn anywhere but from my PC.  How old-fashioned is that!