Week 13 (Final)

Sunday night - Yeah, busy weekend. Hot, hot weekend. In the end, 46 items completed today and 217 items completed total. This week's realization: It's not all about me. These may be things I think need to be done, but if Lori has other stuff she needs done, I can't look at them as interruptions from what I had planned. Or if I'm going to do stuff she's already done or stuff she's happy to do. So the next step is sharing my plans with Lori as I go. However, I will be starting next week at a disadvantage, I don't have time tonight to plan out the next week ahead of time. I'll work into it as the week goes on. That may be the beauty of this evolving thing, it may not be as important to do a lot of prep ahead of time. We shall see.

June Plug

I'm relieved that this month is over. It's been a busy month. Of course, in this case, it's nothing but an arbitrary demarcation because I don't see things slowing down. As always, I'm trying to adjust to rate-limit the chaos, but it's been hard this weekend and into the next two weeks. We're in a bit of a heat spell here. Other places have it hotter, but we don't live in those places and those places are overall better equipped to handle it - they have air conditioning. I am really grateful to have a car with really good air conditioning for the first time in years, but the house is probably best described as miserable. Normally, I'd be able to escape to the office, but next week there's 2 days of holiday and then I have a week of vacation after that. Oh, well, can't be helped. Somewhere in there I'll have to acclimate because otherwise I will do that thing where you die from lack of sleep.

But, still, yeah, it feels like a little bit of a relief to be past June. As soon as I admit that, I come back to the thoughts of the first paragraph but if I allow myself to entertain them, we could be here for a long time.

So...

The Big Elements

Worth Repeating: John McWhorter

Video:


Txtng is killing language. JK!!!: Does texting mean the death of good writing skills? John McWhorter posits that there’s much more to texting -- linguistically, culturally -- than it seems, and it’s all good news. More on TED.com...

Why I'm Posting: Because it completely changes my opinion of texting. Will it cause me to start using TXTSPK? Not in a million years.

Email Five for Friday (A Work-Related Post)

Every Friday (normally), I'd send out this email to my colleagues who work in email marketing within our organization. I figured since I'm already reading the articles and curating the list, I might as well drop it onto my blog as well.  (Usually it's to the marketers, but turns out I also had a few today for developers, so here's two lists.)

For Marketers

Five Engagement Killers and How to Overcome Them
http://www.strongmail.com/resources/blogs/email-marketing-insights/five-engagement-killers-and-how-to-overcome-them

The New Email Rules for CMOs
http://blog.exacttarget.com/blog/heike-bairds-blog/the-new-email-rules-for-cmos

The 5 Design Trends Behind 'The Best of the Email Swipe File'
http://blog.exacttarget.com/blog/email-design-4/the-5-design-trends-behind-the-best-of-the-email-swipe-file

Behavior Psychology and Marketing Conversions
http://blog.exacttarget.com/blog/exacttarget-guest-blog/behavioral-psychology-and-marketing-conversions

Where Spam Traps Come From and How They Work
http://blog.mailchimp.com/where-spam-traps-come-from-and-how-they-work/

For Developers

Why I Blog

"So... why do you blog?"

It's a question I can't remember ever being asked, but it's one I ask myself. So here we are on post 2,961 and now I ask myself this? It is an interesting question. Many have tried and failed/bailed. Why would I post spend time, almost daily, to commit words to the ether where the average post will get about 20-30 the day it's posted and a trickle after that? (Except when I write about GroupOn, fixing my washing machine or Facebook's in-retrospect-quite-failed attempt to kill email.)

It's just one component of the social strategy that is the James Lamb brand. My personal brand. And the TV James subbrand, but that's waning. But, yeah, why bother?

I struggled with that on Sunday, with an idea for a blog I haven't written yet, one that part of me feels like needs to be told and one part of me says "this one's not for public consumption" (hint: it's about my attitude and it's a churchy topic) and so I haven't written it yet, but in trying to decide if I wanted to write it, I found myself asking "Why do I even blog in the first place?"

I think there are several reasons.

I'm leaving you, @DirecTV

Dear DirecTV,

I was really excited to return to you after a long, long gap. Finally I once again lived in a place with the appropriate southern access and a cable system I'd had enough of.  A lot had changed since the last time. I still remember the boxes being delivered to my office and me running home on my lunch break to mount the dish on our apartment balcony and make the adjustments necessary to get a signal. Good times. The software was cludgy and slow and the DVR regularly ate The Amazing Race.

And then we moved to a house that couldn't see you and we went with Dish.  And then a new house and we didn't think any sort of southern access was possible and we went with Comcast.  But that got old and someone swore we really could get a southern view and that weather wasn't really the deterrent that it used to be.

And for awhile, things were good. But then, the emails. More and more emails, more and more irrelevant. (Oh, and for a time, impossible to read on an iPad or iPhone. Thanks for making me only complain three times over six months before you fixed it. You're welcome, by the way.)

But the more the email market matured, the more we looked at what's possible with data, the farther and farther away you seemed to get.  Take this email, for instance:

@worldmarket Sweepstakes Misses the Mark (A Work-Related Post)

So Cost Plus World Market had a contest. One of the ways to get an extra entry was to send an email to a friend. So they asked something like "What's an ideal vacation for you?" Since I was curious to see what the email looked like, I sent a copy to myself.

The email I got seemed to be missing something.

You can see my answer to the question below, but what does it mean?