Research & Analysis of Today’s Internet
There is a graphic designer joke going around that lists the prices starting from “We design everything: 500 EUR,” “We design, you watch: 800 EUR,” “We design, you advise: 1000 EUR,” and ending in “You design everything: 8000 EUR.” In other words, the more clients are involved, the more expensive it is.
Is graphic design a service or a product? This is a question many graphic designers struggle with, even if they do not verbalize it. If you are a novelist or a fine artist, the answer is clear: You are selling a product, not a service. In a way, the price list reflects the spectrum from…
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Remote Working Is Here to Stay
Among the unexpected consequences of the pandemic is the so-called “Great Resignation.” There are two separate phases of this phenomenon. In the first phase, many manual laborers used the forced vacation paid for by the government as a launch pad to new careers. In the second phase, tech workers decided they did not want to return to the office because they fell in love with remote working. As businesses asked them to come back, they quit looking for remote-only jobs.
I’m hearing from business owners that remotely motivating employees is hard, which is…
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Hi, this is Mike from Delancey Gourmet Deli. Can I speak to your boss, please? It’s about the store sign.
Hi Mike, how can I help you?
Hey, John, a customer just told me that “Delancey” is spelled wrong on our sign. He said it’s “cey” not “cy”; there should be an ‘e’ between ‘c’ and ‘y’.
Well, sorry, we just spelled it the way you told us to spell it. So, we can’t redo it, at least not without an additional fee.
How much do you think it would cost?
We would have to redesign it. So, it will cost at least a thousand to redesign, print, trim, and reinstall all three of them.
Man...…
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Everyone seems to be confused about what NFT is, because when you buy one, you don’t seem to own anything, not the copyright, files, URL, or domain name. (Some NFTs allow you to own these things, but those are exceptions.) What you own is essentially the idea of ownership. If you are worried about the file getting lost or becoming inaccessible, just copy it everywhere. Send it to all your friends. It doesn’t matter. You are not paying for the privilege of having the file on your computer. In fact, every time anyone views the artwork in a web browser, it’s getting downloaded to their…
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Facebook and Twitter are struggling with how to moderate user content despite acknowledging the negative effects of social media on our society. But, I’d argue that moderation is not the issue. Content moderation or censorship on social media doesn’t solve any problem because it’s only suppressing the symptoms. The cause is elsewhere. Niall Ferguson has an interesting take on the issue, but focusing on the content won’t allow us to get to the root of the matter.
Much of this problem stems from the fact that efficiency is not actually desirable beyond a certain point. That is, efficiency has…
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I have this fantasy of producing a physical book of my personal essays and photos, and selling it at brick and mortar stores. Since my career has never involved any physical products, I have a yearning for creating an object I can hold in my hands. So, I have been talking to some writer friends about this idea. Last week, I went to see a writer/journalist friend Anne Kadet in her neighborhood in Brooklyn. She has a knack for finding strange things and conducting strange experiments, like what would happen if you ate dog food for a week. She has written for a variety of publications, most…
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Podcast has been around for a long time, but it hasn’t seen the kind of explosive growth ebooks, streaming videos, and social media had. It’s been a long steady growth. A big part of it, I believe, has to do with the relative difficulty in playing it. A radio, which is still used in 60% of American homes and installed in 82% of cars (as of 2018), is a hardware device dedicated to listening to audio content. It’s like a light switch on the wall; hard to beat its ease of use. In contrast, subscribing and listening to a podcast is a much more complex process especially for someone who has never…
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Many content marketers are aware that the same content cannot always be repurposed on different digital platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and YouTube. In the world of television, you could produce a show and try to sell it to different networks as long as their audiences are interested in the particular topic of your show. This is also true with radio stations and print magazines. These platforms are highly standardized, so we define an “audience” in terms of their shared interest in a particular topic, be it sports, politics, food, or fashion. The challenge today is that…
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What makes nonprofits unique among other types of organizations is that many different groups of people (donors, volunteers, staff, the board of directors, beneficiaries, etc.) must collaborate without the strict hierarchical structure of conventional organizations. The grouping of these people must also be fluid. One person, for instance, could be a donor, volunteer, and board member at the same time. In the nonprofit sector, the magic happens by facilitating these collaborations efficiently. Even the smartest, most talented and motivated people will achieve nothing without effective…
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The word “SEO” has dirty connotations because it began as a way to deceive Google. It was a form of cheating. In the early 2000’s, without having any substance, you could drive traffic to your site from Google. Every time Google changed their algorithm, the way to hack it changed. But those days of hacking Google are over. In this article, I’m going to go over how SEO changed over time and what these changes mean for you as a business owner.
The Reality for Business Owners
Today, Google’s search ranking aligns quite well with how we perceive “quality” in content. Because of this, most SEO…
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