Well, Battelle and co outdid themselves on this one. I love maps and I love trying to further understand the consumer internet ecosystem. This one is worth exploring. Special note: make sure to zoom in and out. http://map.web2summit.com/

Well, music accessibility has reached a critical threshhold…I’m calling it The Great Music Discovery Trifecta.  Here’s why:

Now, I can (1) identify, (2) peruse, and (3) own any song I ever hear.  Easy.  In control.

(1)  Shazam on the iphone - “prospecting”

(2) Grooveshark on my home laptop – “filtering”

(3) ITunes into my iPhone – “acquisition”

If you like music and you aren’t using the Shazam + Grooveshark + ITunes trifecta, then you owe it to yourself to give it a go.

Here’s how I do it…(1) anytime I hear a song I like, I whip out my iPhone and use the Shazam app to identify it.  Then, (2) when I get home, I load my list of “potential” songsinto Grooveshark (and any other popular songs by that artist).  In this way, I can listen to the song enough to know whether I really like it or not.  This is the second step in my music discovery funnel.  Finally, after hearing the song a few times, I can (3) choose which ones to buy in ITunes, which I will then have forever – both on my iPhone and at home.

The Trifecta: Shazam + Grooveshark + ITunes

For me, each of these pieces are nice on their own, but insufficient without the other three.  Without Grooveshark, for example, I wouldn’t be comfortable buying everything I’d flagged on Shazam.  Moreover, I would be hesitant to flag something on Shazam unless I was sure I’d buy it.  Without Shazam, I couldn’t have identified what I liked in the first place.  Without ITunes, I couldn’t pump it into my iPhone to have it with me wherever I go.

With all three pieces of The Music Discovery Trifecta, I’m in auditory paradise.

Mike Dorsey & Joan Dorsey at Stanford Graduation

Well, Stanford has been an amazing ride.  I’ve now completed 2 years and have 1 more to go.

Friends: gotten to know some of the most energetic, friendly, and efficient people I’ve ever met.

MBA-MS Joint Degree – I’ve now finished my two years here, but I haven’t yet officially graduated.  I’m now starting a third year, at which point I will have both an MBA and an MS.  I’m splitting the MS between Energy Engineering & Computer Science.

I ended up having to “sleep on it” to make this happen, but my blog is now “fb connected”.  You can test it out by adding a comment, trying the “like” button, etc.

Here’s what I did: I used a WordPress plugin called “Simple Facebook Connect” – it took some fiddling around but it did eventually worked (and saved a lot of time learning their SDK).  I had to upgrade to PHP5, the latest wordpress, and a new template, but that was all housecleaning I needed to do anyway.  Here’s the link to the plugin: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/simple-facebook-connect/.

Any features you think I should add?

Ted Turner spoke at Stanford today and was a hilarious quote machine.  Among all the funny quips, I loved his advice about the key to success as an entrepreneur:

“early to bed, early to rise…work like hell & advertise”

An animated speaker throughout, nothing got him more excited than a comment about captain planet, at which point he cut off the speaker and told everyone how proud he was that he had helped a whole generation of children learn about multiculturalism and the environment through his cartoon.

To me, the most impressive thing about him is that he donated $1B of his own money to pay off the United States’ debt to the UN.

Then, my favorite was this great quote about courage:

I’ll keep that little ditty in my hip-pocket for the next time we need a little inspiration.

Can anyone who was there remember any of the other hilarious stuff he said?

So on Wednesday, I went to a Stanford MBA Admissions session in Bangalore, to be on the student panel.  It was a lot of fun talking to the applicants about the program, about our classmates, the courses, etc.  I was there with Dan, my buddy from South Africa, and Vasily, my buddy from Russia, as we were all interning in India for a month.

The session was fun and the questions were interesting.  But, once we broke into small groups, the obvious and most frequent question was ‘how should I write my essays?’, ‘what are they looking for’, etc?  Answering those questions is almost as impossible as writing the essays is.  The only advice I could tell anyone was to read THIS book.

MBA Admissions Strategy. Getting in to top 10 MBAs

When looking for the right book to read when I was applying, I skimmed the table of contents of every relevant book and thought this was the most useful…I felt that this one did the best job, to me, of explaining (1) what the admissions committee is thinking and (2) what the question archetypes are and how to respond to them.

I read the entire book, cover to cover, 3 different times over the course of my application preparation and essay writing process.  It was literally my reference guide every time I got stuck writing my essays; I marked it up, re-read certain passages many more times, etc.

Everything about the entire application process requires so much personal introspection that it’s REALLY hard to give applicants advice…the usual lame stuff like ‘be true to yourself’ is really unhelpful, so the only advice I can possibly give is, “read this book and do what it says.”

swine flu

(1) It’s allegedly still safe to eat cooked pigs; we’re just not supposed to kiss living ones.

(2) There’s Nothing fun about Swine flu.  For me, it entailed a 101.6 deg fever, exhausted days, two restless nights, some painful coughing, and it felt like a rogue sprinkler had been re-routed through my nose, not to mention 73 years worth of glue-sniffing causing me to emptily stare off into space w/ an empty headache.

(3) The ‘2009 flu pandemic‘ is about the spread of H1N1, about which Wikipedia can tell you more than I can.

(4) Some are predicting that 50% of the US population is going to get some form of H1N1 this year.  It’s obviously difficult to predict, but the incidents are expected to increase dramatically in the first month or so that children are back in school this fall.

(5) The best way to prevent infection is to avoid being near people. If human interaction is unavoidable, then prevent those around you from sneezing or coughing.  Jokes aside, if you feel like you have the flu, my personal experience is that the best thing to do is immediately go to a doctor to get the anti-viral medicine you need.

(6) Even if you wanted to go back to work/school as soon as you start feeling better, you can’t, because you’re contagious for ~7 days from date of infection.

(7) Once I got the right medicine (Tamiflu was my savior), the illness actually wasn’t that bad…basically just a headcold+fever. The key, however, is getting to the right medicine – it is apparently especially important to do so w/in 48 hrs.  I got it after 60 hrs, but by hr 66, I felt human again.  Now, at day 4, I’m at about 80%.

(8) Speaking of Tamiflu, we have the ’05 Avian flu situation to thank for the large stockpiles of the medicine that is now readily available now.  Fearing a global pandemic, many of the world’s governments really loaded up on the stuff.  In fact, the box I received from the clinic in Bangalore was manufactured in ’06.

(9) For once, older folks (>52yrs old) may be in better shape to fight this off than us young whippersnappers.  Apparently, those who got the flu prior to 1957 had a version that is similar enough to this ‘novel H1N1′ that the older folks have some immunities that anyone born after 1957 doesn’t have.  Apparently, it’s most dangerous for pregnant women.

(10) Swine Flu is better than dengue fever.  Another student in my intern abroad program was unfortunate enough to get the dengue (ugh).  As long as you can get the right meds and you aren’t in a high-risk category, then this current version of ‘novel H1N1′ is basically just the flu.

That being said, I’m not a doctor, nor an expert on pandemics.  I only know what I’ve read in the news and wikipedia, plus the advice of a handful of doctors I’ve spoken with about my current, but improving, 5-day illness.  There’s an unbelievable amount of info available about this, so trust experts’ advice over mine.

Public Service Announcement – MacBook speed issues.  I found series of steps that actually fixed my computer speed problems and I thought I’d share what worked.  (Please note, I am not a Mac expert.  I just trusted what these people did and so far, it has worked nicely for me…exercise caution and only do these if you’re comfortable w/ it yourself.)

Got the advice from this forum:  http://community.livejournal.com/macintosh/3164116.html.  People there were nice enough to help some person out – and I happened to find the nuggets later:

Q:  MacBook is laggy, slow, sluggish, stuttering, etc.  Delays when I use mousepad, click around Firefox.  Frustrating.

A: You might do these things
(1) Try going to Accounts in System Preferences and seeing if your account is set to autorun any programs at login, and if it is, remove the ones that you didn’t know were autorunning and remove the ones that don’t need to.

(2) Then, restart the Mac and run Activity Monitor (it’s in /Applications/Utilities) and see what’s running – if there’s anything undesirable running in the background you might want to consider coming back and asking us how to stop it doing so.

(3) Secondly, verification/repair of a disk permission isn’t difficult – simply go to /Applications/Utilities again but this time run Disk Utility, select your hard drive and click ‘Verify Disk Permissions’. Mac OS X will check your drive and come back with a verdict as to how healthy the drive is, and if it isn’t healthy, should offer to ‘Repair Disk Permissions’. Try that, too.

(4) Run Activity Monitor (in /Apps/Utilities) to see what’s running on your Mac. You can sort processes by % CPU or Real Memory to see if anything is using abnormal amounts of system resources. I’ve had problems with Firefox leaking memory

(5) Run Leopard Cache Cleaner and see if that helps.  Run a deep cache cleaning, and all maintenance tasks.   Free download:  http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/system_disk_utilities/leopardcachecleaner.html.

MD: I think what really solved my problem was (5) the Leopard cleaner – I did like 5 different ‘cleaning’ operations using that thing and it even rehabilited my very old iMac, too.

Check out my ‘tweets’ to the right   —–====>>>>

Or, you can follow me by on Twitter by visiting my twitter page here:

www.twitter.com/MikeDorsey

Great chart, “Top 10 Online Retailers by Conversion Rate – October 2008″ posted on www.marketingcharts.com, listing the sites with especially good sales conversion rates.

Matt (@tugglmatt) pointed this out and theorized a bit about why they exceeded the performance of the other gajillion websites out on the information superhighway.  He asked: “Top 10 web retailers by conv. rate. Is it traffic quality? site optimization? user intent? interesting chart…”

This got me wondering, so I checked out a sampling of three that I wasn’t intimately familiar with.  I suspect that conversion rates at a site like ‘OfficeDepot.com’ might partially be so strong because of their obvious brand leadership.  Along the same lines, I figured that a site from a company who was not the obvious industry leader might be more related to its layout and design quality…

ProFlowers.com
Blair.com
Roamans.com

I found ProFlowers.com (same company family as RedEnvelope.com and others) to be especially sharp and awesome.  Roaman’s is awesome too.  I find the actual product listings sub-pages to be more attractive than the index page on all 3 examples.

So here’s a quick hit list of my observations.  Clearly, this isn’t the whole story, but I noticed the following common threads:

First, they all have the obvious, clean layout, seo friendly text link navigation, nice buttons, sharp edges.

• All have bright colors, either a pretty pastel or otherwise attractive coloring
• Lot of white space, or clean space
• All have trust signals clearly displayed…McAfee, plus Verisign or another
• All have narrow page width, not 1000mpx, would fit horizontally on small-ish monitor
• Product prices in red font
• Large selection of relatively low cost products
• Images’ prices displayed below the image, not to the side
• Full secondary product pages always 4 columns wide, many rows tall,
• Prices in red font in two of them
• Attractive smiling women on index page of two
• All have nav bar across top, not along side
• All have a search box clearly displayed at the top
• Order Status, Track My Order links at top of every one

So what do you all think?  What about these sites makes their per-visitor conversion so much higher?  Notice something in common among them that are unobvious?  Other examples of the finest sites you can think of?