GTD Tip: Personal Blog as Ultimate General Reference File

Readers of David Allen’s Getting Things Done are familiar with his advice that general reference files are best stored in one A-Z file drawer (or rather one A-Z file system, using as many file drawers as your space allows.)

For e-mails that are not actionable but may have some future usefulness, storing on your local hard drive in a “Reference – Business” or “Reference – Personal” folder is a good option. You could make it one big reference folder, too. The point is your reference e-mails are in one location (and with a big enough hard drive, space isn’t an issue) where you can use indexed search functions to find that old message when you need it. More on e-mail implementation of GTD in a future post.

What about personal thoughts, notes, web site links, etc. you may want to access later? The proverbial “note to self” e-mail is an option, which you can then put in the reference e-mails archive on your regularly backed up 😉 hard drive. That’s perhaps the best option for sensitive or confidential information.

For everything else, a personal blog is an elegant solution that offers several benefits:

It is completely and easily searchable based on any word or text string you can recall about the contents. If, for example, I’m trying to remember the vitamin-related web site I heard about from my friend Morri last week, I could go to the search box in my right-hand navigation, type “Morri” and press enter, even if I couldn’t remember the name of his company or that his last name is Chowaiki, to find my post about dinner with him and several other ALI conference participants.

It allows you to add comments about and context for the resources you are gathering. Social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us (to be addressed in a future post) are great for adding one-word tags to a web site (and you can add brief comments), but to capture a train of thought relating to some information, a blog is unbeatable…and you don’t have to remember the exact tag you used. You can search on any tidbit relating to the post that you happen to recall.

Your thoughts and learnings are available to the world (unless you decide to make your personal blog a private blog that is password-protected for access.) Your post may lead to comments from someone else, which can help both of you, and others who may find your conversation.

For example, when I attended the ALI conference on blogging and podcasting in San Francisco last week, I posted on both of the pre-conference workshops and each of the general sessions. I included links to the speakers’ sites and to those they resources they mentioned during their presentations primarily so I would be able to go back and refer to them. This will be a valuable resource for me, much better than handwritten notes in a binder that will go on a shelf. And by including links to my posts, Shel Holtz made the information more easily accessible not only to those who attended the conference and knew I was blogging it, but also to his network of readers.

Finally, storage is unlimited, free, neat and orderly. You can dump the information into the blog, but if never clutters your desktop. If you take time to tag and categorize, it may be more easily accessible, particularly for others. But as long as you have a search function on your blog, it’s out of sight, out of mind, not cluttering your desktop (either physical or virtual)…but instantly accessible.

How cool is that?

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Three Strikes, and Starbucks’ Podcast is Out

Starbucks

Podonomics has a review of the news that Starbucks is discontinuing its podcast after only three episodes.

Among the problems cited: Boring topics delivered without energy, obvious reading from a script, distracting music and a infomercial flavor.

After outlining some specific suggestions for how the podcast could have been successful, the author concludes:

Overall, Starbucks’ focus was wrong. They failed because they focused on the coffee bean. They would’ve succeeded had they focused on their best asset – their customers and the stories they would happily tell about their experience with coffee.

Good principles to keep in mind for anyone considering a podcast. It can and should be much longer than what fits in commercial radio, but it’s got to have some life. It doesn’t need to reach even a 1 share, but it needs to have something about it that would be engaging for someone.

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Click-Fraud: Worse than TiVo?

The Post has another article about click fraud and how some internet advertisers are attempting to band together to fight back:

In the past year, industry analysts say, new forms of click fraud have emerged from the shadows of masked operations into plain view on the Internet. Dozens of Web sites offer to pay people to sit and click on ads, or to type certain words into search engines for hours at a time. Some sites have forums where people swap click-fraud tips.

Advertisers, who often pay for online ads only when someone clicks on them, have been crying foul and complaining to federal regulators. They’ve also sued the Internet’s largest ad networks, Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc., which earlier this year settled class-action lawsuits by advertisers.

A new lawsuit was filed last month in Pennsylvania seeking class-action status against Google. The FBI, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the U.S. Postal Inspection Service are investigating click fraud.

On-line advertising is gaining phenomenally because the results supposedly have been better than those for the 30-second spot. I wonder how the problem of click fraud compares with the problem of people skipping the commercials when they use TiVo or another DVR.

TiVo

It’s a different kind of issue, but the same effect: paying for an audience that isn’t seeing the ad. Click fraud is malevolent and deceptive, more like a RICO activity. TiVoing is just an individual’s decision to fast-forward through the commercial.

With click fraud, the advertisers lose because they may be paying a dime for each click (although the price varies depending on the demand for the search term). The person doing the clicking loses too, because at half a penny a click, if they can click on 10 ads a minute (waiting for the sites to refresh so they can click again), that’s a nickel a minute or $3 an hour. Google and Yahoo (and the web sites that receive the fraudulent traffic, and whose owners must be behind the click-fraud rings) are the winners.

Still, I wonder which is the bigger economic problem for advertisers: skipping broadcast ads or fake clicks on web ads?

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Washington Post: Instant Letters to the Editor

Earlier today I saw an article called “A Messy Age for Music” about digital music on the Washington Post site. It was part of a package the Post put together on the iPod’s 5th birthday.

I thought the article was pretty informative, but just took issue with a quote that essentially equated the iPod with Betamax or 8-Track tapes. Maybe it’s just that we’re an eight-iPod family that makes it personal for me, but I just believe that with this week’s announcement that Apple sold 8.73 million iPods in the last quarter, and bringing the cumulative total to more than 67.6 million, it’s pretty unlikely that Apple’s AAC format is going to become obsolete and unplayable.

I searched the web to find how many total 8-track units had been sold, and couldn’t find a figure. Anybody have a number on that? I’m betting it was significantly less than 67 million, and that the critical mass for the iPod format will keep it from becoming obsolete.

So I blogged about it, and linked back to not only that article, but all of the articles in the series.

Then, as I was reviewing traffic to my blog tonight, I realized something interesting: several readers had gotten to my post through the Washington Post site. When I clicked back I discovered this:

Post Links to Bloggers

Since this is powered by Technorati, I assume it’s important that you “ping” Techhnorati in order to be included in the listings. I have used the free service pingoat to ping Technorati and several other blog engines.

I had seen and heard some articles about how the Post “gets” the conversation of the blogosphere. It was neat to experience it first-hand, and to write a letter to the editor that was essentially published instantly.

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