When It Comes to Refried Beans, I Choose Rosarita Every Time
I recently graduated from college and moved into my own apartment. That means that I've been buying stuff on a routine basis to keep my "household" running smoothly (i.e. food, cleaning, hygiene, storage etc).
In stepping into this world of buying things on a routine basis I've become hyper-aware of how indistinguishable most products are from each other (i.e. cheese, toilet paper, dishwasher detergent etc).
I now know why companies like Proctor & Gamble spend so much money on ads trying to distinguish their indistinguishable products from competitors.
I've always thought that I wasn't influenced by TV/print/radio ads but now when I browse through Safeway and Target aisles I can't help but have indistinguishable products jump out at me because of all the ad money spent on them over the years.
Maybe it's just me but I'm finding the realm of personal buying trends to be very interesting.
Can you ever recall the last time you saw an ad of any kind for refried beans? I can't. But, when I go to the supermarket to buy refried beans I go with Rosarita Vegetarian Refried Beans every time.
No exceptions. No wavering. No second thoughts. Rosarita. Every. Time.
Why do I go with Rosarita when there are so many other refried bean products to choose from? When I have a blank slate due to the absence of refried bean ads? The reason is pretty simple: Rosarita is what my family always used for all their refried bean needs.
I'm not sure what refried bean product I'd choose if I'd seen refried bean ads my whole life. Or if a friend tells me to try a new refried bean product that "is way better than Rosarita".
SNPedia Releases a Mac Version of Their Promethease Tool. Hurray!
I've been waiting for Mike Cariaso over at SNPedia to turn out a Mac version of their Promethease tool.
Well, last night Mike emailed me and told me they now have a Mac version. I immediately ran my raw genome data (a file downloaded from my 23andMe account) through the tool, which took about 2 hours.
The tool compares your raw genome data against SNPedia's impressive collection of DNA information and creates a report that you can browse. Here's a screen grab of my Promethease report:
SNPedia explains how to read the Promethease results here. This is the general format for the results:
As you can see above, the presentation of the report's results is very basic. They plan on improving the report in future iterations. Stay tuned here and over at SNPedia's blog.
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Google Health is a Phenomenally Useful Tool for Armchair Doctors
Google Health officially launched today and I couldn't help but create a profile and see what I could do. In under 5 minutes, I linked my Longs Drugs account to my profile, added my doctor to my profile and added some pertinent personal details.
Right now, the feature that impresses me the most is the "condition or symptom" reference tool. You can enter a condition like "Vitiligo" and Google Health provides a whole package of amazing results.
Here is a quick rundown of all the stuff Google Health's Vitiligo page provided:
1) Definition
2) Symptoms
3) Treatment
4) Causes
5) Tests & diagnosis
6) Complications
7) When to contact a doctor
8 ) Illustrations, 9) Related news
The related news feature is very helpful in finding relevant news coverage on Vitiligo.
10) Google Scholar results, 11) Related Groups
I like that you can see what the experts have published on Vitiligo or you can go find advice/support/whatever from people who also have Vitiligo (AKA the amateurs).
12) Search trends
This is probably the most Google-y feature on the Vitiligo page. And, it also seems to be highly relevant and insightful.
The “TechCrunch Bump” Isn’t Magic for Small Blogs
Back in early December 2007, Mike Arrington wrote a TechCrunch post that linked to this blog. His post sent over a horde of TC readers AKA the "TechCrunch bump".
At the time, I thought it was going to give my blog a huge reader base that would cling to my every word post after post. Well, that's not what happened. As you can see above, the "TechCrunch bump" quickly dissipated and returned to pre-bump numbers in little time.
What lesson can small blogs take away from my experience?
Just because TC and its readers find one of your posts interesting doesn't mean they will find your future posts interesting.
Why? Because if you have small blog (traffic-wise) it probably means a couple of things:
1) It's your personal blog (like this blog). And, most personal blogs are only interesting to the author and a couple of his or her friends.
2) You cover an array of topics (like this blog). There's only a few blogs that cover tons of topics and are also popular (i.e. Kottke.org). Most popular blogs cover very narrow topics and become the definitive source for those topics (i.e. TechCrunch and Web 2.0 startups).
3) Your blog is relatively new. It takes awhile for readers, Googlebot and other bloggers to find your blog. Just because they find one post doesn't mean they find the rest of your blog (A result of #1 and #2).
All in all, you shouldn't focus on getting magical links from huge blogs. Instead, you should ignore the huge blogs and focus on posting content from your own distinctive voice day after day.
As you can see above, it's been about five months since my small blog got the "TechCrunch bump" and I'm only up to about 20% of the daily readers I got from the bump.
Wiki: Where to Watch NBA Games Online
We here at BUZZYEAH love watching NBA games. Go Warriors! However, we don't have cable or TV so we have to do all our NBA watching at friends' homes or on the Internet.
We've noticed through our own Google-searching experiences that it's hard to find sites that stream NBA games online. They either have strings attached (ahem ESPN260) or don't exist.
So, we've decided tap into the power of the Google-searching crowds and create a wiki for where to watch NBA games online.
The wiki, as you can see below, is very simple consisting of only two input columns: "Website name" and "URL". Anyone can edit or add to it. To add to it, use this form (Not viewable in RSS reader):
What's been added so far (Not viewable in RSS reader):
I'm sure we might add a few more input columns in the future, so please leave suggestions in the comments if you have any good ideas.
ESPN360.com Streams NBA Games, But Your Internet Provider Needs To Be on the “List”.
This blog gets a lot of Google searchers looking for where to watch NBA games online. I wish a had a definitive answer for where to watch NBA games online but I don't.
ESPN360.com is one of those places where you can find streaming NBA games online. But, it's not available to everyone.
If your Internet provider is on this list than you have access to NBA games on ESPN360.com:
Unfortunately, my Internet provider Comcast isn't on the list so I don't have access.
Is your Internet provider on the list? If not, leave a comment telling us where you live and who your Internet provider is.
