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Revision as of 04:08, 26 June 2005

FANS a-t temporal gyrus d-o-t com (delete spaces and dashes)

About Me

I believe the answer to everything is cybernetics. Some of my biggest passions of the last few years include social systems (especially stigmergic phenomena such as the web, wikis, and spreadfirefox.com), george spencer brown's laws of form and goldbach's conjecture, emotions, full body massage, and all forms of drum and dance. Like I said, it's all cybernetics.

44; brit; "home" is beautiful Pumpkin Hollow, a commune in east Tennessee USA.

I'm an occasional marketer (eg was vp marketing for Serif) and occasional Mozilla marketing contributor (eg wrote the Mozilla 1.0 guide with Mitchell Baker and Brian Heinrich). To round out this mini-resume, I'm politically green (just finished helping my sister win a green seat in Leeds, UK by doing a lot of walking and making two websites), and an occasional hacker (eg perl -- I love Perl 6).

My Mozilla focus right now is Spread Firefox (SFx) and the press blog which I plan will ultimately morph into a replacement for FANS via structured use of SFx.

a recent pic of me attempting (succeeding) to look even more gormless than usual

Discussions I might start

Mozilla Market position

IBM launches "The Future Is Open" ad campaign promoting Linux. Could mozilla ride IBM's marketing somehow? Discuss in Talk:Market position/Open. -- raiph 14:35, 18 Apr 2004 (PDT)

Thunderbird versus Webmail

"Rich Clients Still Trump Web Mail For Businesses". Arguably, implicit in this headline are the notions that:

• Rich Clients May Not Trump Web Mail For Consumers; and
• Web Mail May Trump Rich Clients For All One Day.

If so, where does this leave Thunderbird? Discuss in Talk:TB and Webmail. -- raiph 14:35, 18 Apr 2004 (PDT)

Marketing tools

4Ps vs URLs

For the last few years I've been pondering an Internet alternative/complement to the traditional Marketing 4Ps -- Product, Price, Placement, Promotion (which are sometimes extended to be 5-8 Ps, including things like People).

I currently call my alternative/complementary model The Marketing URL -- Users, Resources, Links. (Or The Marketing URLs -- "Users Resources Links system", to highlight the fact that this is a holistic model that highlights how the elements interact, rather than a reductionist model that doesn't.) The Marketing URL provides a framework for analyzing/understanding/discussing the way Internet Users (customers and computers) get connected to Internet Resources (products and propaganda) via hypertext Links (on sites and in messages), which arguably covers everything that really matters, marketing wise, on the Internet.

I've created a diagram corresponding to the Marketing URL model. Here's a hand drawn, messy, indecisive version I created a couple years ago, scanned rotated and with a black stripe scanning artifact ;>: What I should do is clean the diagram up and turn it into something clickable. But that'll have to wait. For now I'll do a table.

Hmm. I need a system for identifying the 25 distinct regions in the diagram/model. Hmm... Here goes. Note that there are three pairs of concentric circles that intersect. In the following, I use O (upper case letter O) to indicate the region between a pair of concentric circles and o (lower case letter o) to indicate the region inside the inner circle of each pair. So each pair, ignoring overlaps, has two regions, O and o. An O or o is followed by one or more letters that correspond to the U, R, or L pair(s). For example, OR represents that part of the O region of the Resources pair that does not overlap either of the other two pairs, oURL represents the region where all three o regions intersect, and OURoL represents the intersection of the User and Resource Os and the Link o. Clear as mud, right? :)

Anyway, here's the 25 distinct regions, each with a corresponding Critical Success Factor. I'm not precisely sure what I meant by some of them, why I picked them, etc., partly because it's years since I last looked at this, but I'm sure it all made sense to me when I cooked the URL system and diagram up. :)

The model can segment the circle pairs independently. You could, for example, consider all Links and all Users for a particular Resource. Or just search result Links, just Females, just Serif products.

I might expand this to something that's actually useful one day. ;)

The Marketing 4Ps

The Marketing 4Ps are often a great way of looking at things, but they're sometimes limiting and anachronistic when applied to the Internet. The following notes on each of the 4Ps may be hard to accept, or seem unimportant even if true, but I believe they are both true and important.

• Product: digital products and digital content are converging.
• Price: digital products want to be free in both the free as in beer and free as in speech senses.
• Placement: digital products aren't placed, their promotion is.
• Promotion: promotion and product are converging.

Analyzing prospective marketing messages

Here's a system I've made up for providing some measure of objectivity in assigning a "goodness" rating to prospective marketing messages:

1. For each prospective marketing message:
   1. For each characteristic in the table below:
      1. Assign a score out of 10
      2. Calculate the weighted value by multiplying your assigned score by the weight shown for that characteristic.
   2. Total up the weighted values.
2. The position with the highest total wins!