Posts from October 2004

So I rebooted my laptop and desktop search is working again.

But it is still indexing my hard drive, three days after I installed it.

That’s not a great introductory experience.

I visited my election dashboard sites today.

Something weird is going on at the Iowa Business School Futures Market. They captured the big debate-driven move that Kerry made earlier this month, but now they have a sizable Bush bounce. I don’t see that in my other two dashboard sites.

Take a look at Bush’s approval ratings. After being sub 50% all year, Bush’s approval ratings moved up above 50% in the late summer and held there until the debates. Now they are falling fast and may reach the low point of 45% before the election. That would be bad news for Bush. It’s hard to be re-elected when 55% of the country thinks you are doing a bad job.

The electoral college numbers are also looking better for Kerry.

So I am not sure what to make of all this, but if I was trading on the Iowa Business School market right now, I’d be shorting Bush at $0.60 and buying Kerry at $0.40 all day long.

Everyone tells me to get Lookout and forget about Google’s desktop search.

But I want to be able to search my entire desktop, not just Outlook.

I tried X1 and hated it.

So I, like everyone else it seems, downloaded Google Desktop Search late last week.

First it took about a day to index my hard drive. It was a bit of a nuisance and got in the way of some other applications I use that need to scan my hard drive on a regular basis.

But after all that work, something isn’t working right.

It worked fine yesterday.

Whenever I try to do a desktop search today, it get an error message that the browser can’t connect to 127.0.0.1:4664.

If anyone has any ideas what’s wrong, I’d love to hear them.

On Saturday morning Josh and I stopped off at the Grey Dog on the way to soccer. As we were eating our muffins, they were playing Belle & Sebastian, one of my all time favorites.

So I went back and listened to some of their older albums this weekend. My favorite is If You’re Feeling Sinister and the best track on that record is Get Me Away From Here, I’m Dying.

So it’s my MP3 of the Week.

Frank Barnako, who I read daily and usually agree with, said something on Friday that really irritates me.

He said, “almost nobody reads blogs“.

Well I must beg to differ.

Frank – somewhere around 5,000 to 10,000 people per month read my blog. And its just my personal experiment with transparency.

Wonkette got 140,000 visits last wednesday. That’s one woman doing that. I seriously doubt the Washington Post, the paper Frank compared blogs to, gets 140,000 visits per day for every journalist it has on staff.

And how about that for transparency? Nick Denton posts the sitemeter stats for his blogs for the world to see. I am not aware of any “traditional media” company that does that.

Instapundit did over 8 million (yes MILLON) pages views last month.

If these stats read “nobody to you” Frank then I am missing something.

Frank – please tell us how many people subscribe to your daily column. I’ll wager its less than many blogs daily visitor stats.

Regular readers of this blog will not be surprised that I agree with the New York Times that John Kerry should be our next president.

Right wingers will say, “of course the New York Times came out for Kerry”, and I agree. But that doesn’t mean the Times didn’t get it right. Jeff Jarvis points out that most of the editorial was a slam on Bush’s four years, a well deserved slam I might add, but it also had some good stuff about why a vote FOR Kerry is a good idea.

over the last year we have come to know Mr. Kerry as more than just an alternative to the status quo. We like what we’ve seen. He has qualities that could be the basis for a great chief executive, not just a modest improvement on the incumbent.

and this

We have been impressed with Mr. Kerry’s wide knowledge and clear thinking … He strikes us, above all, as a man with a strong moral core.

and this

Mr. Kerry has the capacity to do far, far better. He has a willingness – sorely missing in Washington these days – to reach across the aisle.

But this race is mostly a referendum on Bush. Why is why, Jeff, that most of these editorials spend most of their time talking about him.

And so I’ll leave with a quote from the New York Times endorsement that says it all for me.

We look back on the past four years with hearts nearly breaking, both for the lives unnecessarily lost and for the opportunities so casually wasted. Time and again, history invited George W. Bush to play a heroic role, and time and again he chose the wrong course. We believe that with John Kerry as president, the nation will do better.

Josh and I went to the Jets game with Jackson and the Legal Diva.

They played the San Francisco 49ers.

The Jets were asleep for the first half, but they came back strong in the second half and made a key interception with a little more than a minute to go to seal the deal.

The final score was Jets 22 – San Francisco 14.

We were chanting J, E, T, S, Jets, Jets, Jets all the way home.

It’s too close to call on the Presidential races. But the other important thing, no matter who wins, is the system of checks and balances. We have a situation where the Republicans control the White House, the Congress, and the Supreme Court. I’d much prefer it if each party controlled at least one of these three institutions.

Since we can’t impact the outcome of the Supreme Court, other than voting for the presidential candidate whose “litmus test” we agree with, the Gotham Gal and I decided to get busy and figure out what’s going on in the Senate Races.

A good place to start is Electoral-Vote.com’s Senate pages. There is a lot of date there if you are interested, but here’s the bottom line:

So what’s the bottom line? Probably the Democrats will pick up Illinois but lose Georgia and South Carolina. Assuming they hold South Dakota and Nevada and the Republicans hold Missouri and Pennsylvania, the Senate will be 45 Democrats (including Jeffords) and 49 Republicans, with tossups in Alaska, Colorado, Florida, Louisiana, North Carolina, and Oklahoma. To take unambiguous control of the Senate, the Democrats have to win them all. If they win five of the six and Kerry wins and the Democrats win the special election in Massachusetts, they also take control of the Senate and John Edwards gets a real job–breaking ties in the Senate. A tall order, but not impossible.

After learning that, we talked to some friends in the senate, some people who do political fundraising, and talked it over some more. We decided to support the following candidates. These Democrats all have a good shot of winning, need money badly, and if they win, will give us the checks and balances we need.

Tom Daschle, South Dakota
Erskine Bowles, North Carolina
Ken Salazar, Colorado
Betty Castor, Florida
Tony Knowles, AlaskaBrad Carson, Oklahoma

The links are all to pages where you too can contribute. I don’t care if its $20, $200, or $2000. If you feel the same way we do, go make a difference. It’s the one way you can hedge your bets in this important election year.

I listened to a very successful email marketer give a presentation yesterday. She runs a large ecommerce business that is doing very well.

She said her return on email was 40 to 1, meaning she got $40 in business for every $1 she spent on email. Wow!

She said her return on paid search was 8 to 1.

And paid search is a $3bn business. And email marketing is probably less than $1bn.

So what gives?

Well, she went on to say that she views email as a “finite” opportunity. She believes she is limited to mailing to her “house file” and she is limited in the frequncy she mails to it so that she doesn’t “burn it out”. I totally agree with the “burn out” comment, but not entirely with the “house file” comment and I don’t think email is a “finite” opportunity.

But regardless, $40 of business for $1 spent is a huge return. And there’s an arbitrage opportunity in the difference between 8 to 1 and 40 to 1 for marketers to play with. Email is the single most profitable marketing channel that I’ve ever seen. And so it’s going to grow. Possibly at the same rates as paid search going forward.