November 2005

looks like we attract good people.

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As I read through 83 some odd comments on the Signal Vs Noise blog tonight I came to the conclusion that comments suck. It’s cool to have an ongoing discussion with your readers or fellow readers but when it turns into a biased bitch fest than what’s the point. It reminds me of my favorite corporate past-time: meetings.

Frankly, I don’t care about your personal opinions on the matter if you are just playing devil’s advocate. Personal opinion has some relevance but having data to back this up goes a lot further. Reading through these comments reminded me of why I quit participating in forums years ago. Sifting through irrelevant content and taking it personally while reading through other people’s comments is a waste of my time and theirs.

This reminds me of a situation discussed in the latest Forbes article on Google’s corporate culture. At Google, when you are participating in a meeting, the person with the best data wins — “In some meetings people aren’t allowed to say “I think … ” but instead must say “The data suggest … ” We’ve all been in meetings where someone with no relevant data or ‘hard’ proof insists that their idea is the only idea. This same atmosphere exists in comment rolls and forums. I don’t care what you think if you can’t prove what you think is right. To me, that’s just common sense.

So, I beg the question… should we include comments? Let us know

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Well, the rumors are out and about again concerning the sovereignty of Netflix. I wrote about this in July when the gossip was up in the air as Netflix filed an Executive Severance and Retention Incentive Plan, also known as ‘how the founders will make money by selling their company’ plan.

Regardless, I am very unhappy with myself concerning Netflix because when I wrote that article I was flirting with the idea of buying a lot of stock in the company as I believed they were on the verge of a buyout. At that time, shares were trading at approximately $15, whereas now they have hit a 52-week high at $28 / share. Oh well, I just would have made a near 100% profit.

The rumors nowadays (which I predicted are that Amazon will purchase the online rental giant, at $42 / share which comes to a valuation of around $2.2 billion. By the way, that’s a ridiculous over-valuation at approximately 30 times next year’s projected profits.

Anyway, it’s inevitable. So, buy yourself some stock. If they aren’t sold in the the next year, you can look to see the price per share in the mid to upper 30′s, which is still a solid profit.

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I’m the marketing coordinator for a company that shall remain nameless, but one of the roads I have to travel down for my job is researching technology, printing, marketing, and other companies to get things done such as going to print with marketing collateral.

More often than not, I look right to the web to see what the companies can offer and almost every single corporate site I goto looking for answers. I find ( keep in mind these are technology companies) the next worst site I’ve ever seen. Gobs of html errors, invalid CSS, impossible navigation hierarchies. It is just impossible to find what I’m looking for sometimes.

It still boggles the old mind that these companies and the people pulling the puppet strings at these fine establishments could let this go unflagging. Now not all sites have to be amazing aesthetically, but I believe that if you are promoting coding errors and using nested tables inside nested tables to relay information to your customers, you don’t deserve them.

”It is an encompassing term dealing with the knowledge of humanity’s tools and crafts.” – Wikipedia.

Therefore one would think that a ‘software company’ for instance, would probably have a website that when an average user would visit, they would think to them selves, ‘this seems like a technology based company.’ Not… ‘this seems like my kid made this with Pagemaker in 7th grade and its still up on the internet? Wow hun, take a look what I found.’

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