That John Martin

Tom Anderson reports on some of the new panel quality tools from Peanut Labs and MarketTools and lays down the gauntlet on unreasonably long questionnaires.

Secondly, with professional respondents gone, who will take the 45 minute surveys some researchers like to field? First of all let me say I think anyone who tries to field a 45 minute survey, only to reduce the data later with factor analysis, should be ashamed to call themselves a researcher. If you know what you are doing you should be able to design a good 15 minute segmentation survey. However, some consultants and end clients seem to think volume of data is more impressive than quality of data. This may be one of the best possible outcomes from this new technology, that no one will ever again be able to field a 45+ minute survey.

Good discussion thread at the bottom of the post, too.

We’re launched. Finally. Say hello to Crowd Science.

It’s been a huge week, equal parts fun and stress, but we did it.

You can read about the company and our new product, Crowd Science Demographics, over on our website or go and register for a beta account.

I’m incredibly proud of what we’ve built and excited about what lies ahead. Onward!

Ricky Van Veen tumbles a Charlie Rose interview with Ted Turner:

I’ll say it again — old rich men with something to say are one of [my] favorite things in the world. They have the money to allow them to talk about whatever/whoever they want and not enough time left on earth to hold anything back.

Gordon “Butch” Stewart, the founder of Sandals Resorts, on dealing with a hotel close to the airport in this month’s Inc magazine:

Everybody thought we’d be out of business the first month because the hotel is very close to the airport. We came up with the idea of everyone waving to the people that were leaving in the plane, and kissing the one you love when a plane flies by. I don’t think we have five complaints after that.

And then the Concorde started flying to Jamaica once a week:

[The Concorde] made more noise than any airplane I’ve ever heard. The buildings shook. So we turned all the beach lounges to face the airport, and that magnificent airplane would get up right in front of everybody on the beach. Guests would come rushing in: “Has the Concorde taken off yet?” We made a promotion out of it.

Clever.

I publicly thanked the folks at Fog Creek for kindly switching our account subdomain for us (due to a company rename), so when the Beanstalk guys did the same thing, and upped the ante by allowing us to nominate a time for it to be done, I thought I should extend my thanks to them. So, thanks Chris!

BTW, if you’re a startup and buggering about maintaining your own Subversion installation, configuring websvn, and integrating with things like FogBugz and Campfire… you should seriously think about giving Beanstalk a go. We pay just $25/month for 20 users.

Ahh, life in the cloud.

I just discovered Datawocky, a blog by Anand Rajaraman, cofounder of Kosmix. Anand has an interesting post up on some attempts at the Netflix prize made by some of his students at Stanford. The most successful strategy, at least among this group, was to make use of a second, independent dataset: IMDB.

But the bigger point is, adding more, independent data usually beats out designing ever-better algorithms to analyze an existing data set. I’m often suprised that many people in the business, and even in academia, don’t realize this.

Great article by Avinash of Occam’s Razor on adding context to your audience metrics.

So what is this mysterious magic potion?

Its quite simple really, in its simplest form it is surrounding your Metrics, Key Performance Indicators, Reports, Dashboards etc with other information (quantitative, qualitative, tribal knowledge) that adds a pinch of color. Context.

I am constantly switching my Mac’s sound output between headphones and speakers, and as a result, am constantly bitching about having to open up the Sound control panel, switch to the Output tab, change the setting, then sometimes switch to the particular app, open up Preferences, switch to the Sound tab, and make the same change again.

And then along came SoundSource. It took exactly 0.24 seconds of Googling to find and not much longer to install. And now I have a nice dropdown in my menubar.

And for bonus points, the license had very plain “What that said” explanations below each section.

Happy days.

We’ve had some shitty customer support experiences lately — I won’t name names — so when we asked the Fog Creek folks if they could change the subdomain of our hosted FogBugz account and then woke up to find it done and dusted in a little over a day with the perky email confirmation below, well, we were chuffed.

Your wish is our command.

Your website is now [new co].fogbugz.com.

Let us know if there’s anything else we can do for you!

We even forgot for a moment that the FogBugz wiki doesn’t surface a text-based markup language! (Markdown support would be so sweet.)

Thanks Eric!

Despite a suggestion to the contrary, Ray Poynter suggests that land lines are becoming increasingly rare, and that it’s not only the “socially excluded and the odd” that are sans terrestrial telecommunications.

I’m with Ray. I haven’t had a land line since 2002.

PopSample is growing. We have a great core team that hails from the halls of Apple, Autodesk, comScore, and Cisco, but we need more help.

We’re currently looking for a Software Engineer in Silicon Valley, and an Account Coordinator in Toronto.

If you think you fit the bill, or know of someone that might, give us a shout at jobs@popsample.com. We offer competitive compensation, flexible hours, expensive office chairs, big LCD monitors, and an operating system agnostic workplace.

Dick Costolo talks about the power of free in his first Wizard post of the year:

Look, there are plenty of great business models based on charging a subscription fee. It’s also the case that we’ve all been burned by “now it’s free, now it’s not” services in the past (think ATM’s, for example….it’s free until we’re all using it, at which point it’s $2 per withdrawal). Nonetheless, it would appear that models in which revenue and earnings accrue to a company as an indirect function of its free use are the models that have the most powerful impact on the Internet today, and you work against that trend at your own peril. This is probably true even where specific industries continue not to admit it. When you add costs to using a product/service, you add friction to customer adoption (he said, stating the obvious). If somebody else comes along and figures out how to make money on such a service by providing it for free, then it’s not so much fun to be you because your competitor’s lack of friction is going to make life harder for you. And time and time again on the Internets, we see that somebody ultimately comes along and figures out how to make a lot of money by offering for free a service for which somebody else is charging.

Paul has shamed me into reviving my blog. And we have a startup to talk about. So let’s see how we go.

I’m dying here. LibraryThing is my favourite online book cataloging application. I thought for sure they’d be on Facebook within days of the F8 release. iRead has a quarter of a million users already. Time’s a wastin’…

My far-too-articulate cousin has been on fire since booting up his blog only a matter of weeks ago. His most recent missive points to a Truthdig debate between Sam Harris and Chris Hedges on (such frivolous topics as) religion, politics, and the end of the world. Well worth a watch, particularly Sam’s closing statement where he invokes the good witch/bad witch defense.