I love this little unscientific idea from 37signals that puts into perspective some of the shortcomings of the Kindle from the point of view of the overall experience:

The price of shipping is imperfection. If you wait for your product to be perfect, you’ll never finish it. Fortunately you can decide which features should be closer to perfect and which can slack off a little.

Read What’s the suckage to usage ratio?.

The fellow in this article in the Guardian is putting the whole Aligned Goods idea of mine to the test.

Mark Boyle took it upon himself to live one year without spending any money. In the article he states:

I believe the key reason for so many problems in the world today is the fact we no longer have to see directly the repercussions of our actions. The degrees of separation between the consumer and the consumed have increased so much that people are completely unaware of the levels of destruction and suffering involved in the production of the food and other “stuff” we buy. The tool that has enabled this disconnection is money.

Detachment is certainly a reason things go downhill, in my opinion. Out of sight, out of mind, the saying goes.

At another point he says how he realised I was looking at the world the wrong way, and this caused something to click in the way I was thinking about applying my values in how I live my life.

The whole idea of Aligned Goods – which I have yet to write about – is finding and building a life where your consumption¹ is aligned around your values. But I wonder if instead of finding a way to participate in the economy following sound values is the right way to look at it. On a personal level, yes, it helps to participate according to your values, but on a grander scale there is the desire to change the underlying mentality of consumption that exists in the current mentality or economy, and I am not sure that simply the idea of Aligned Goods will do that.

The New York Times provides this excellent interactive widget for visualizing the jobless rate from January 2007 to September 2009 by different demographics. Head on over and have a click or two, it is a great example of a quick and easy to use interface to express different subsets of data.

Amazon Frustration-Free Packaging (here too) looks to be a great idea as they are working directly with manufacturers to box products in Frustration-Free Packages right off the assembly lines, which reduces the overall amount of packing materials used.

They also mention that A product’s original box often is not designed to be shipped directly to the customer. To ensure it arrives safely, we may place it inside another box. With Frustration-Free Packaging, the products have been designed to ship in their original containers directly to the customer. Great stuuf!

Frustration-Free is a neat idea for a way to market this but the environmental benefits are going to be the bigger more tangible award, in my opinion.

A great article from Dennis Yu on TechCrunch as the spammy situation over at facebook starts to unwind. If you happen to have websites that host advertising and/or use AdWords, a nice bit of confirmation from someone deep in the online ad game appears in the comments:

Most performance marketing products/services aren’t profitable on the back-end if they are paying out $6.00/CPMs, but the shady offers and the way they are marketing can be profitable.

So if you don’t have a pricey high-margin product just use some shady techniques and catchy adverts (and data from Facebook Profiles) to create the margin, thereby pushing out the lower margin players and leaving the room open for more crap. Nice.

Another little gem in the comments. The comments are really quite good…

…If you want to provide the pristine user experience, you’re taking a massive hit to your earnings, maybe can’t pay your mortgage, or whatever. How do you feel about that?

An eye-opening read from Bill Gurley over at abovethecrowd.com examining some of the strategy behind Google’s moves with Android, free GPS on Android phones and the idea of The “Less Than Free” Business Model. It is long but be sure to read until the end for the full effect.

Herd Mentality by John Gruber is a fantastically written and lucid look at Apple vs. the herd mentality in the PC industry and how they ignored the calls to become the only other player in the operating system game for PCs.

Conformity is a powerful instinct. There’s safety in numbers. You have to be different to be better, but different is scary.

I must admit that I am behind with respect to using Google Website Optimizer, generally programming bespoke a/b or split tests for clients.
35 Resources for Getting the Most out of Google Website Optimizer over at the KISSMetrics Blog looks like a good reading list, so now my only excuse is having the time to read all of the information they are linking to. I have gone and downloaded some of the videos to my iPod.

GWO assists in testing ¹ variations of pages more or less automatically. We’re really looking forward to testing this out.

Old news, but something I have something to say about (eventually on the blog). Research has been undertaken into the effects of calorie restricted diets on humans and whether this has a positive effect on longevity.

To me much of it sounds like a healthier life in addition to a longer life; many of the diseases effected by calorie restriction cause various issues from changes of lifestyle to medication to surgery and suffering (for the individual and family members).

Eat less, live more from the Economist.

Robin Sharma, the author of the bestselling The Monk who Sold his Ferrari, has a theory that you can build a habit if you do something consistently for 30 days. And he, like many other performance and motivational coaches, believes in being grateful ¹.

This video that I just received via email from Robin puts the two ideas together: every morning write down ten things that you are grateful for. Hear it from Robin on the video (a.k.a. watch the talking head.)

I’m going to give this a try by adding it to my morning routine and will report back in 30 days!