Being Mark Cohen

There’s an article on a site I love to follow, called Damn Interesting. It’s on something called the “above average effect“. It’s a gem, I recommend reading it.

“When asked, most individuals will describe themselves as better-than-average in areas such as leadership, social skills, written expression, or just about any flavor of savvy where the individual has an interest. This tendency of the average person to believe he or she is better-than-average is known as the “above-average effect,” and it flies in the face of logic… by definition, descriptive statistics says that it is impossible absurdly improbable for a majority of people to be above average. Clearly a large number of the self-described “above average” individuals are actually below average in those areas, and they are simply unaware of their incompetence.”

This is phenomenally good, and I think it goes a long way to explain why the Lake Wobegon Strategy tends to be mythical. Most companies are staffed by people who believe they are above average. Anyone who has spent woeful hours poring over cv’s trying to hire skilled workers can attest to the fact that no-one ranks themself as “mediocre” or “sub-standard”, and most people are only willing to grade themselves as average at a skill they have no interest in pursuing.

So as a massive generalisation, you could imagine this: People who think they are better-skilled than their industry peers but who are actually sub-standard, hiring other people who they think are better-skilled than they are but who are actually worse. This scenario is basically people trying earnestly to implement the Lake Wobegon strategy and being totally unaware how badly they are failing.

Pepsi has done a viral marketing competition based on sms and the seriously viral component is on their website.
Give it a go, it’s addicitve

I wrote a faxing app a long time ago, that cobbled a few systems together and removed the need for an SME to print purchase orders before faxing them. I remember at the time that it was very difficult to find decent documentation or support for faxing from .net. This may have changed, but just in case it hasn’t I’ve abstracted the faxing code into a standalone dll.

One thing to watch out for is that fax automation does not like to work if you are trying to fax html documents. It’ll work fine with a .txt file or a .rtf or a .doc file. Astonishingly enough, Word is happy to play with the automation but, probably because of all the nasties IE has to deal with, IE will not come to the party. I vaguely remember having trouble getting pdf files to fax too.

Here’s the library for anyone who wants it. There’s not much to it at all. Hopefully it’ll save someone else having to figure it out though. SendFax.Install.msi

Guy Kawasaki, the guru of the Startup, has written on his blog that if you have a valid US address and you sign up for www.inBubbleWrap.com at the right time you could get a free copy of his book The Art of the Start. Wish I had a US postal address

Matt forwarded on this incredibly interesting post in the Google research blog: Hiring: The Lake Wobegon Strategy. Peter Norvig ran a simulation showing what happens to the quality of a team using two different hiring approachs. One hires people better than everyone else in the team, the other hires people better than someone else in the team. ie better than all vs better than one.

The last team I built I was particularly focused on making the best possible hires and I would rate all the guys I pulled in as excellent, as good as me or better at hands on development. That team did incredibly well and delivered unmatched product.

Back in South Africa on the other hand, we biult a team based on pulling in graduates and juniors. We never really knew the quality we would see as they were ultimately all people who would require mentoring. The quality of what we delivered was always adequate but never excellent. The juniors on the team lacked inventiveness. Over time the quality of the team degraded, or so I believe at any rate.

I am still a firm believer in hiring people who are better at the job than me, and I would bet that the guys at FD would agree that my hiring strategy paid off, I just never realised at the time that it was a mathematically modellable heuristic

Just read that TFS is to go RTM on 17th March (18th March Aussie time). You know why? Because I am 50% of the way through migrating to subversion. That’s why. I guess we’ll be on svn until at least next quarter. I’m just gobsmacked at how spectacularly bad my timing is.

I have been playing around with a (relatively new) stock photo site called Fotolia. They have stock photos from $1 which you can’t really argue with. A lot of the photos are amateur, especially the cheap ones. Hold your mouse over a photo in the search results, and watch the cool Ajax in action. Also, the level to which you can zoom is nice.

A friend of mine has put together a website selling car parts online. The site is not doing well at all and so I offered to take a quick look at it. The following is what I fed back to him after a five minute review. If you see anything glaringly obvious and catastrophically bad that I have missed, please drop me an email or comment and I’ll forward on to him He’s a web novice and so I’m starting off with the very basics

1. The pages are structured well although the pages are a bit heavy. They are good enough though.
2. On the sidebar there are a whole lot of links to Ford, NRMA, Norton, etc. They point to those sites and these links are on every page. If you can remove the links or point them to pages inside the site, that would be better. The images are fine, it’s just the links out to other people’s sites that you should get rid of.
3. Get rid of the link to eHub.com.au in the footer of the site.
4. Try and have as few links that go outside of the site as possible
5. The site is listed on Google but they haven’t crawled beyond the homepage yet. It takes a while to get crawled,ultimately it’s a waiting game
6. Get as many people as you can with relevant sites to put up backlinks to the site with the words "car parts" in the link:
7. The html for the link you need to get from people is like this:
   

   <a href=”http://www.parts4cars.com.au” title=”car parts online”>car parts</a>

8. The guys who set the site up have left the packaged products meta data in the meta tags. Meta tags are tags in the head section of web pages that describe the page. There are two important tags – keywords and description. Keywords is blank and description is “The powerful shopping cart software for web stores and e-commerce enabled stores is based on PHP / PHP4 with SQL database with highly configurable implementation based on templates.” This should be fixed to reflect the site’s content. They are setting the page headings on each page but not the keywords or descriptions. I would regard this as defective product and ask them to fix it. The site hasn’t been fully crawled yet so fixing the meta tags should be a priority.
9. The links and images don’t use titles. When you hold the mouse over a link it does not show a tooltip. You can set the tooltip to show something like buy [product] online which will target the extra keywords. Similarly for images. Search engines don’t know what the images are so they look for the “alt” text which describes the image. These are not imperative fixes but would be something to look at soon.
10. If possible, I would swap the page title elements around. Right now it says “Parts 4 Cars – Air filter”. I would change it to "Air Filter – Parts 4 Cars" . Even though the site is called "parts 4 cars" I would consider using "parts for cars" as it is a much better match compared to what people would type into a search engine.
11. When you go to a product detail page, the Meta description is set properly but still no keywords. I would ask this to be fixed as defective too.

This was just humorous. I was browsing for new businesses in Pagewood to do my wuarterly DMOZ update, when I found this well-indexed site: http://www.toiletmap.gov.au/. The site has a pagerank of six. That astonished me, I never knew that many people planned their out-of-home ablutions that seriously

I’ve been using a crowd called webhost4life.com for a few years now. Their service started off as great value for money, but recently more and more things have been going wrong. Web Stats files getting corrupted repeatedly, asp.net issues between 1.1 and 2.0, and this morning an unexplainable site down. I have five live sites with them, two of which are commercial and require better service and up-time.

They’re cheap, which is why I used them initially. If you know of a good and not-that-expensive hosting company, preferably local then please let me know. so far the best value I’ve been able to find has been www.destra.com.au