Ravi’s Rants

If I had to pick just one blog, and could read only one blog for the rest of my life - including my own blog (the one you’re reading right now) - I would pick Seth Godin’s blog.

Seth’s blog is (hyperbole alert) amazing, educational, informative, remarkable, mind-blowing, extraordinary, purple, eye-opening and goose-pimple-raising good.

Seth’s books, his blog and his words have become such an integral part of my life, that I ended up creating a separate category here. I still have to go back and tag some of my older posts, but you can read all of the posts where I’ve written about or referred to Seth Godin, by going here.

But don’t read just Seth’s blog. You don’t have to.

Read some of the best blogs out there, along with Seth’s, all on one page by clicking here.

It’s not really purple in color. But I did mean that it is Purple.

Why?

It’s because of the way it was successful in creating an entirely new industry of “athlete marketing” like never before. Because of how it created a frenzy among consumers. Because of the innovative ways Nike marketed it [for instance, they paid $5,000 in fine for every match that Michael Jordan wore these banned (then) shoes on court].

Not even Apple - to this date - has been able to match the hysteria that these shoes created (have you ever heard anyone getting mugged or killed for an iPod or iPhone?)

And yes, I was a teenager when I read and watched news about people getting mugged and killed for Air Jordan shoes.

Now go make your own Purple shoes.

If you’ve ever wondered about the power of influence that videos - even free ones - can have in selling commercial products, look no further.

Recently, I was on the receiving end of this power, as I shelled out about $3,200 to buy a Yamaha Motif Keyboard - thanks(!) to two powerful videos on YouTube.

I’ve chronicled it in my rather new blog, MotiFreak.com.

I recently asked a very close non-blogger, never-blogged-before friend to start his own blog on my new multi-blog site, YehHaiIndia.com (driven by WordPress Mu - very cool software).

His immediate response was:

The problem with blogging is you need ideas and thoughts you want to write.

And you are assuming I have thoughts that are worth writing about….

The biggest problem with publishing a blog, is not that you may not have enough or something worthy to say.

The biggest problem is actually “fear”.

“I can’t believe he wrote something that stupid!”
“What the heck was she thinking when she wrote that?”
“He has no idea what he is talking about!”

Fear of criticism. Fear of being judged.

We don’t want to put our thoughts and opinions “out there” for everyone to judge; and for some to call us “a moron”, “clueless”, “totally wrong”.

Whereas blogging is like thumbing your nose at this fear.

You put yourself out there in every post. Every thought and comment and opinion in your blog is yours - and yours alone. You are setting yourself up for criticism and judgment and name-calling. And you want people to read your posts, criticize you, judge you, interact with your blog and give you feedback.

As long as we fear this feedback, we simply cannot do remarkable things.

No, it doesn’t mean you ignore common sense and do something stupid (like putting crazy photos of you on your blog while somehow involving your employer).

It means that if your post makes sense, and all you fear is being judged by your colleagues, friends or family - and fear about what others might say, then I say, just get over it, thumb your nose at your fear, and get ‘er done.

This has been around for a while now, but its coming out of beta (a.k.a Google Labs) means that Google is serious enough to support this going forward.

Here’s how it works:

• Dial 1-800-GOOG-411 (800-4664-411)
• Say where you’re calling from - City, State or Zip
• Say what you’re looking for (Pizza delivery, from the video below)
• GOOG-411 connects you with the one you pick from the spoken list (or you can get it text msg’ed to your phone)

GOOG 411 - Totally free 411

“The _____ swept down from the hills like a dark and hungry wind.

The first thing anyone would notice would be the _____, its long white hair flew wildly in the breeze generated by the two swinging katanas that had been enchanted to draw blood from anything, even lamp posts and cheese.

Raised in a school for ninjas who also did kung fu and kickboxing as a hobby, the _____ was …. but also possessed the secret skill of being able to ….”

I challenge you to fill in the “_____”. What do you think the text is about?

Well, then I guess you probably haven’t heard about Woot.

The passage above, is the product description of a “HP 3210 All-in-One Printer”. Yes, a printer!

Woot sells exactly one product a day - at a pretty good price. They’re not the cheapest, yet they almost always sell out the same day. Within hours, sometimes. And they don’t carry the same product more than once.

The product descriptions are remarkable: they give you the highlight, and are incredibly funny. These guys have a great sense of humor, and everything about their site has a Wootouch to it.

Today, they’re partnering with a big company. And like most other companies, they could’ve written a plain, boring press release like this one (yawn).

But Woot is different, of course. They had to do it in style.

Woo Woo, Woot!

If you know what a “blog” is, you probably already know what a “RSS Feed” is.

One of the best (not to forget, cheapest and fastest) ways to get free content for your web site, is to display a third-party RSS Feed. Every time the feed’s content changes, content on your web site automatically changes, thus keeping the content fresh and ever-changing on your site.

This trick can be used for both legit and illegitimate purposes. Sploggers (those who create Splogs - “SPam-filled bLOGS”) often use it to generate thousands of “made for adsense” pages, whose primary intention is to increase PageRank, get ranked higher for highly competitive and high paying keywords, get people to visit their splogs, and manipulating the navigation that they end up leaving by clicking on AdSense (or other PPC) ads.

But if you use it for legitimate purposes, you will find that publishing RSS feeds on your site can be a great way to provide targeted, complementary content for your visitors.

Magpie RSS is a great open-source PHP script that will allow you to easily publish any third-party RSS feed on your site. I have personally tried many RSS scripts, and highly recommend Magpie. I have even used Magpie to create a pretty cool web-based feed-aggregator service, a la Google Reader and Google Personalized home page.

If you want a quick and customizable free script that is based on Magpie, and gives you sample scripts that show you how to publish one, two or more feeds on a page on your web site, go get my Free RSS Feed Publishing script, “FeedMonster”.

- Ravi Jayagopal