john keegan dot org

The Baltimore Sun has a fascinating article this morning (link) in the fact that women are increasingly finding tha using the Internet is a more efficient use of their precious time than watching morning shows on TV… Should come as no surprise but the change seems quantifiable now:

When her children were young, Jenny Lauck flipped on Today or Good Morning America as she brewed her morning coffee and tended her babies.

But several years ago, the 34-year-old mother of three stopped watching the morning shows. After getting TiVo, she had no patience to sit through multiple commercial breaks during a live newscast. On top of that, the segments seemed frivolous.

“Watching morning television for me is the equivalent of reading People magazine in the dentist’s office,” said Lauck, who writes for Web sites from her home in Santa Rosa, Calif. “It seems like a lot of fluff. I feel like I can get information faster and cleaner on the Internet.”

Lauck is not alone in souring on network morning news programs. In particular, this season has seen a significant erosion of the shows’ demographic sweet spot: 25- to 54-year-old women.

Almost 450,000 of these women - coveted by advertisers because of their household purchasing power - have turned off the three broadcast morning programs this season, a decline of 10 percent compared with the same time last year, according to a Los Angeles Times analysis of Nielsen Media Research data. Male viewers the same age also fell by 9 percent, but they make up a smaller portion of the audience.

It’s difficult to trace the exact cause of the drop. It comes after two popular morning hosts, Katie Couric and Charles Gibson, left their shows to be evening news anchors. At the same time, the popularity of online news sites and the frantic press of daily life appear to have led many women to forgo morning TV. Women are also turning increasingly to “mommy blogs,” which now number 6,400, according to the blog search engine Technorati, to swap tales about modern motherhood.

Please check out the rest of this article, this really shows the impact that access to community and content is having on our lifestyles.

If anyone out there had any doubt about the utility of OpenID, there are now 63 million AOL/AIM OpenIDs.

63 million AOL/AIM users can now login to your application using OpenID if you support it…

63 million…

Kathy Sierra answers the question: How can I get our employees to be passionate about the company? Wrong question, she says.

The company should behave just like a good user interface — support people in doing what they’re trying to do, and stay the hell out of their way. Applying the employer-as-UI model, the best company is one in which the employees are so engaged in their work that the company fades into the background.

…

Finally, if you really want your employees to be passionate about the company, take lessons from UI and Usability: let people do what they want and need to do, and get the hell out of their way. Unfortunately, too many of our employers are like really bad software–frustrating us at every turn, behaving inconsistently, not giving us a way to learn new things and develop new, cool capabilities, etc.

She offers this 4 question test to see if you have passion for your work:

1. When was the last time you read a trade/professional journal or book related to your work? (can substitute “attended an industry conference or took a course”)
2. Name at least two of the key people in your field.
3. If you had to, would you spend your own money to buy tools or other materials that would improve the quality of your work?
4. If you did not do this for work, would you still do it (or something related to it) as a hobby?

A must read.

Rick Ralston of Real Metrics dropped me a line the other day:

We’re thinking of adding a new category to our RealMetrics website for Blogging software. It would be similar to our shared web hosting category at http://www.realmetrics.com/a/shared-hosting. Any thoughts or ideas would be appreciated.

Interesting question. It’s a lot easier to compare the performance of 2 standard web hosts, since you can create a reference page, upload it to each host, and sample the performance of identical pages at different hosts. But for managed blogging, such as BlogHarbor or Typepad or Blogger or Wordpress.com or Squarespace, it’s simply not possible to create identical pages. Measuring the performance of an image download or a file download doesn’t measure the true performance of the system. Managed blogging platforms typically generate pages out of a database, so while it’s not possible to create identical pages it’s important to create similar pages on each platform so you can make a valid comparison about the performance of each platform.

Here’s my reply to Rick:

Here’s what I’ve come up with… Most of the things you are measuring with shared hosting apply to blog hosting… The only thing that’s going to be an issue is measuring performance. Why? In measuring standard web hosting, you can measure apples to apples because you are able to upload a standard page or site containing the same number and size of objects to each host. So you are able to compare the retrieval of -identical- 100K of html page and 250K of image downloads for example…

With blog hosting, at least managed blog hosting, you won’t be able to upload a standard page to measure. Well you could, but you really want to measure the speed of let’s say the home page of a blog rather than some static files. Since blogs are typically database driven applications, the real key here is that although you won’t be able to measure oranges to oranges since each blog application will generate a slightly different page, you still want to at least measure oranges to tangerines (OK, I have stretched this analogy way too thin!)…

By that I mean that you’ll want to make sure that each blog contains a set number of identical posts. Create 10 posts of varying length, some with images and some without, and post them to each blog platform. Use the default template supplied with the blogging platform. Take a look at 4 or 5 platforms and see what the page weight comes out to be for a blog containing 5 identical posts and whatever is on the default template. I suspect they will all differ by less than 10%, and if not then I think it should not be of much of a concern but the page weight should be listed in your results so your visitors can take that into consideration…

Anyone out there have any thoughts for metrics to measure performance of managed blogging services?