Issac G's Blog

Apparently, the PR people at the White House seem to think so.  I just dug up this interesting graph which shows the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level of US Presidential Inaugeration speeches, and it shows a serious downward trend over the past century or thereabouts.

One can quickly note several things about this graph.

First is the downward trend.

Second is the way the speeches’ score is usually lower for second terms than it is for first terms.

Third, is interestingly the presidents who spike up…  Hmm…

Anyway, I stumbled across this by chance when doing more research in finding better tools to help me calculate the Flesch-Kincaid scores of my end-of-the-year email that I just prepared for my blog subscribers, and had to share it when I saw it.

Comments are welcome!

I love Perry Marshall. The guy’s a wellspring full of great information (not the useless kind!) whom I first encountered through his great Definitive Guide to Adwords. But this post isn’t about how he helped me with Google Adwords.

No, it’s about the really useful trick that he taught me today about how to increase your sales by decreasing the IQ required to understand your sales copy.

In his own words:

One of the secrets to writing great copy is making it REALLY easy to read. 7th grade reading level or lower = good copy. College level = BAD copy. Bad. (Always!) Most of Gary Halbert’s classic letters read at the 4th to 5th grade level. That’s why they’re so “primal,” so persuasive.

He also pointed me to a great free tool which will help determine your own copy’s readability. Check it out here.

For example, this blog post is readable by a 5th grader – too bad it’s not a sales pitch, eh?

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I am very thankful to all of you, my faithful readers, twitter followers, mailinglist subscribers and downline members.

Without you, my online business would not exist, and I know that many many of you say the same about me.

I am thankful for the opportunity you guys have given me to learn from you, and with you. The opportunity you give me to better shape my own business by learning of yours and your needs. The opportunity you give me to meet new people, through yourselves. And, of course, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t thankful for the commissions that you generate for me directly, and indirectly through your own hard work .

Next month (New Year’s time) I’ll go into the bit about how I hope we’ll grow together over the next year to build ourselves and outdo ourselves, but the truth is that between now and then is the hottest part of the civil year in many many markets – so I hope that in the short period of time before the end of next month, we use the time wisely to build our businesses and position ourselves for the new year.

I know I’ve got lots of big plans for the next month, and hope that you’ll all be a part of it.

So for those who celebrate it, have a happy and meaningful thanksgiving!

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The whole online community is a-buzz on the experimental SPDY protocol (pronounced Speedy) recently proposed by Google.  I’ve been holding myself in since I heard about it, and want to set the record straight on a few things.  I know that a lot of people from my marketing blog won’t really get this, and a lot of traffic stumbling on this won’t appreciate the rest of my blog (which just kinda sucks for you guys) but here’s my geeky response to all of the hubbub.

First of all, please stop writing about how SPDY is going to replace HTTP.  It’s not.  It’s mostly  going to wrap HTTP.  RTFM folks, it says so black and white in the 2nd question in the FAQ there.

Second of all, the server push, and server hints have been something that I’ve been talking about for years.  I’ve had some conversations with Roy Fielding about that (go Google his name if you don’t know it) and the answer was always to not do it.  There are very few cases where it will really help and in most of those cases that will require caching and/or pre-processing of the original or primary resource server-side.

Third of all, the Apache HTTP Server community addressed the lengthy headers a years ago.  A replacement protocol called WAKA was mentioned.  I’ve yet to see someone pick up that gauntlet but if the folks at Google care so much, why don’t you use that instead of adding mandatory compression around the whole protocol.

Fourthly, to all you small webmasters who are drooling over the speed boosts, did you notice that every web site now needs SSL?  The IP isn’t a problem, as I assume that SPDY-enabled servers and clients will also be SNI-enabled, but that does mean shelling out money for signed certs on every single website, based on my understanding of the SPDY proposal.  And if the server/clients are NOT forced to be SNI, then SPDY is going to pollute the IP space – which might actually be a good thing if it forces more widespread adoption of IPv6

Finally, I have to wonder about the timing of the announcement.  The fact that there are already beta clients and servers suggest that announcing this a few weeks earlier would likely have been possible.  If so, why deliberately wait until a week AFTER the larget opensource HTTP server’s semi-annual conference to announce it, instead of flying Google’s top folks over to Oakland to talk about it with some of the biggest people in the webserver community?  It just seems… odd… to me.

In conclusion, I think that SPDY has potential.  Google can “pull a Microsoft” and shove the protocol down our throats one way or another if they really want to, but is it really justified?

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I discovered this yesterday on Youtube.  Don’t remember how exactly I stumbled across their videos, but I love the idea of what they do.  They’re basically promoting personal and environmental health by adding a “fun element” to menial day-to-day tasks.

My personal favorite is the bottomless wastebin.  I’m still not quite sure if there’s a “plunk” at the bottom of the journey, but the idea’s cool!

It’s good to see that people still have their thinking caps on.

It’s certainly inspired me to think a bit more out-of-the-box on the menial projects and tasks that I work with on a day-to-day basis.

On a bit of a rant, the truth is that traffic exchanges have been working hard at exactly this for several years – how to make the click-click-click more fun and entertaining.  I’ve always thought that that was just to prevent total boredom of the surfers (and it certainly is), but seeing these videos has me re-thinking that idea (and others, in general)

I think there’s a lot to learn from it

Kudos to Volkswagon Sweden and DDB  Stockholm for this initiative!