Crying probably won’t get you any brownie points, but thanks for trying

Hillary Clinton showed some emotion on the campaign trail today. My guess is that she was crying because her hopes of getting the nomination are slipping away. Crying is also my last resort. Let’s say that I’m pretty much already getting dumped by someone (as Hillary is getting dumped by Iowans and the New Hampsters), crying can be an effective tactic to claw your way back in for a few weeks, months, or even years! But obviously the American public isn’t buying into this. I personally fear an oligarchical society (even moreso than we already have). But if Hillary gets the nomination, I’ll have to be pulling for her.

As an aside, it looks like Hillary Clinton is a pro user of Flickr (well, I’m sure one of her staffers is). Some cool photos to be seen here. Including this one.

[update: apparently crying does get you brownie points.]

Potato-Flavored Air Spray?

Fragrance Free Oust Air Sanitizer does not, in fact, not smell. I think it should be rebranded as Vodka-scented. Because it smells like a handle of vodka.

Rookie Football Coaches Are Idiots

If Pittsburgh’s Head Coach Mike Tomlin (pictured above, and not to be confused with baseball pitcher Mike Timlin) didn’t go for those two 2-point conversions in the playoff game tonight, there was a much better chance that the Steelers could have taken the game into overtime. I was talking to my dad about how I don’t think rookie coaches have the necessary skills to make the proper decisions in the playoffs, and here’s a prime example of the aforementioned lack of skills. Obviously, Jacksonville had a chance at a touchdown at the end, but I’d rather be up 3 in the last minute than be up 1 in the last minute.

Another thing my dad brought up is in 1998, when the Broncos were playing Green Bay in the Super Bowl and were driving (the same situation as the Jaguars were in tonight), and Mike Holmgren told his defense to let the Broncos score. That way, the Pack had more time to try to get a touchdown (which they almost did). I would have done the same thing. You’d have like 90 seconds to try to score, rather than the 30+ seconds that Pittsburgh had left.

Better luck next year, Steelers.

I love, however that the image was already up on flickr for me to use in my blog entry. This was the other image from the first page of results (sorted by date posted) that I was going to use for the blog entry. Saucy.

Doppelbock Beer Dinner

I am part of a beer blogger group that posts about a similar topic on the first Friday of every month. I post at beerdinners.com, and this month’s topic was Doppelbocks. So last night I made a beer dinner. Was tasty. Read more at beerdinners.com. It was definitely some gourmet shit.

Hits can come from anywhere

Had a discussion with someone today about how the number of hits you get may not translate into real customers. A percentage of these hits come from spammers and people who aren’t remotely interested in what you’re talking about. And even if you can factor those people out (especially when the spammers are trying to mega-comment-spam your site), you can’t always know that even the people who arrive are interested.

Take work. A simple website I built got a decent number of hits today from a large newspaper’s blog subdomain. A few more clicks with Google Analytics (which is a must have for any website no matter the size or content) revealed that this particular blog was about soccer (which is also weird because I used to write a soccer blog for a retail client at my old agency). I navigated to the blog in question and saw that the link to our site was in a list of other holiday-themed links at the end of a lengthy soccer article.

So people were reading the post and clicking on his links. How many of them are over 21? How many drink beer? These questions can’t really be answered. I do get a good idea of how many people click on this guy’s links, though.

I guess that’s the tough thing in word of mouth marketing, it’s difficult to fully quantify the people we’re actually reaching out to. But I need to keep motoring to create the best content I can.

Incidentally, I was looking (in vain) for a photo for this entry and stumbled upon Dashalytics – a dashboard widget for Google Analytics. It’s a nice and simple interface to keep track of the websites you administer. Seems easier than going into Google Analytics every day, and you can open the same widget multiple times (to have multiple sites up on the dashboard at once). I never use dashboard, so maybe this is a good way to implement it into my life.