November 2006 Archives

The Pareto principle (also known as the 80-20 rule, the law of the vital few and the principle of factor sparsity) states that for many phenomena, 80% of the consequences stem from 20% of the causes.

The Pareto principle was named after the Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, who observed that 80% of income in Italy was received by 20% of the Italian population, but the same principle can be found in many other situations.

In most businesses, 20% of the customers account for 80% of the sales. And technical departments know that 80% of the problems are caused by only 20% of the clients. This is very interesting information for managers, who can use these numbers to steer their sales and support departments.

But how can we correlate the Pareto numbers for these two departments? Are the 20% that purchase the most the same customers that use most of your organization's resources? Well, experience tells us that this is not the case: there usually are customers buying for huge amounts without ever needing the support department. The two Pareto principle are not correlated, so if we only look at the small group of customers responsible for 80% of the sales, you will find once again that 20% of that group is using 80% of the resources.

Dear spelling checker,

Please do not consider the internet as something holy. The internet is simply a technology for delivering information, just as the postal service or the cable television. There is nothing that makes the internet of a higher level than other things and ideas on this planet.

So please stop telling me that I should write internet with a capital i. It is internet and not Internet, did you get this?

Kind regards,

Jeroen Sangers
Frustrated writer.

A while ago I tried out the new Google Reader, and haven't looked back at my old RSSBandit ever after. It ran very smoothly since the start, and I just love the 'River of News' view.

But lately the experience has decreased. The last few days Google News feels slow, taking about 2-3 seconds to go from one article to the next one when I press the J key, which was also noticed by Robert Scoble.

I also noticed that sometimes it doesn't load all my unread items as it did before; after reading about fifty articles, I reach the bottom, while there are still many unread items waiting for me to be read. This is not a big issue, as I can simply press the R to refresh.

The last days I noticed another glitch: zombie articles:

Google Reader tells me Your reading list has no unread items., while at the same time it shows that I have two unread articles from tech.memeorandum. For me, this is the most irritating glitch, as I have to leave my River of News to open the specific feed, change my setting to show all articles and go down the list to find the zombie.

Google Reader still is my preferred reader, and I hope they will solve these glitches soon.

More and more bloggers unite in so-called blogging networks. Robert Scoble published a good overview of the most important networks in Competitors of PodTech that I love, er, going to the Content Mall --a content mall is the same as a blogging network.

As I am interested in blogging in general, I have been following various blogging networks for some time. I can clearly see the benefits of blogging networks for the bloggers involved, but have been wondering for a long time what the benefit is for the visitors of a site part of a blogging network. So I posted the following comment:

It is clear that ‘content malls’ bring in huge benefits for the sites within a mall. They can work together and link to each other to boost PR. But what benefit is there for the visitors? Shopping malls bring benefit by sharing a physical space with various stores. After going shopping for clothes I can buy some electronics without having to drive to another place. Very comfortable. But when visiting a fashion weblog part of a content mall I can go to the technology weblog of that mall just as fast as I can go to any other techblog. I won’t visit the technology weblog because it belongs to a certain group, but rather because I like it in spite of being part of that group.

Answered promptly by Robert self:

By joining a network a blogger/podcaster/videoblogger will probably be able to get paid much more than if he/she tries to do it on his/her own. That money might let them quit their jobs (that’s what happened to GeekBrief.TV, for instance) which will enable that person to produce even more content for you. Or, maybe, afford better equipment. Or, maybe be able to afford a trip to more industry conferences where they’ll be able to bring you more news and information.

Robert completely hits the nail on its head here. What is good for the blogger is good for his/her reader.

Sometime, thing that have been in place for many years get in the way. In such cases, it is better to get rid of them.

Today, I said goodbye to the music jukebox the place where for the past two years you could find tasty music. In this age of streaming music and video, there is no need any more to share MP3 files. Sites like last.fm and pandora are of greater help for discovering new music you like.

I also removed the jeroensangers.com site. Until now, that page showed an ugly photo of me --is it possible to have a pretty photo at all?-- and some likes to my various sites. I am going to rethink the purpose of that site, which will probably contain more dynamic content. Until then, the site is in stealth mode.

Now, that feels a lot better!

[Via Volker Weber]