Archive for May 2012

No more comments

After blogging here for over eight years, I’ve decided to switch off comments. 

Its clear that there are many ways to keep track of comments now, especially with social networks. I thought that implementing Disqus would help. But when your blog post reaches Google Plus, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. and it gets its own individual comment stream, it gets really difficult to keep track of where the conversation is any longer. I also get a lot of comments via email, which I get too much of to begin with. As I get busier, I certainly have less time to respond to comments anyway.

Surprisingly, disabling comments had nothing to do with spam. Akismet has been taking care of that quite well for the many years it has been used. I probably miss a few good comments here and there (because I never check the spam queue), but thats ok.

Something to sync comments across all social networks might be cool. I’ve yet to see that yet.

MariaDB 5.5 has deprecated PBXT

One of the things we (Team MariaDB) talked quite a bit about since we released was PBXT. It was a feature differentiation to MySQL as we shipped another storage engine. It was included in MariaDB 5.1, 5.2, and 5.3; however with our release of MariaDB 5.5, PBXT (docs in the Knowledgebase) has been deprecated and not built by default any longer.

The reason behind it is clear: PBXT is currently not under active development. We still include it in the source releases and if you would like to use it, you just have to build it. If and when development around it comes back to an active state with bugs being fixed and the engine being pushed forward, I’m sure we’ll start building it again. In the meantime, much thanks to Paul McCullagh for developing a great transactional engine.

Advice from David Ogilvy about group buying

I just started reading Confessions of an Advertising Man by David Ogilvy of Ogilvy advertising fame. I’m about half way thru it and I think that if you’re in the advertising, media, or the digital/social space, you should definitely read this brilliant book.

He lists four problems that advertising faces, and I highlight excerpts of problem one (highlighting is my own):

The first problem is that manufacturers of package-goods products, which have always been the mainstay of advertising, are now spending twice as much on price-off deals as on advertising. They are buying volume by price discounting, instead of using advertising to build strong brands. Any damn fool can put on a price reduction, but it takes brains and perseverance to create a brand.

Listen to a speech I made in Chicago in 1955:

“The time has come to sound an alarm, to warn manufacturers what is going to happen to their brands if they spend so much on deals that there is no money left for advertising to build their brand. Deals don’t build the kind of indestructible image which is the only thing that can make your brand part of the fabric of life.

Andrew Ehrenberg of the London Business School has one of the best brains in marketing today. He reports that a cut-price offer can induce people to try a brand, but they return to their habitual brands as if nothing had happened.

Why are so many brand managers addicted to price-cutting deals? Because the people who employ them are only interested in next quarter’s profit. Why? Because they are more concerned with their stock options that the future of their company.

Price-off deals are a drug. Ask a drug-addicted brand manager what happened to his share of the market after the delirium of the deal subsided. He will change the subject. Ask him if the deal increased his profit. Again he will change the subject.

This was David Ogilvy talking about modern group buying sites in 1963.

Yesterday I asked on Twitter: Do you run a restaurant? Have you succeeded in running a group buying deal? Have you seen return customers? Comments like its a scam, anyone that wants a cut price deal is unlikely to return for full price, and even feedback from buyers whom don’t return due to disappointing experiences or how the food just isn’t worth the full price. I had some offline conversations about this and the ones that did return were basically already loyal customers saving money through a deal.

My own thoughts about group buying have been posted before: a Groupon before you close looking at the deal dynamics behind a deal, and some initial thoughts when they first started becoming mainstream.

Information diets and media biases

Via Murdoch’s Pride is America’s Poison:

In the digital era of do-it-yourself news consumption, it is easier than ever to assemble an information diet that simply confirms your prejudices. Traditional news organizations, for all their shortcomings, see it as their mission to provide – and test – the information you need to form intelligent opinions. We aim to challenge lazy assumptions. Fox panders to them.

Brilliant article on ethics and the role media plays. In today’s social world with social feeds, you tend to get news that is influenced by what your friends read (Facebook has several such apps). On Twitter they don’t even necessarily need to be your friends, just people you choose to follow.

In the Malaysian context, this really means you need a balanced news diet. Mainstream media is pro-ruling party, while alternative media tends to be pro-opposition or sometimes have their own agendas. There’s no middle ground in the sea of tabloids.

No longer affiliated with MNCC and TeAM

Its worth noting that I’m no longer on the councils for the Malaysian National Computer Confederation (MNCC) and the Technopreneurs Association of Malaysia (TeAM). For MNCC, it was a retirement at the end of a term, and for TeAM it was a resignation during the term. Yes, both allow you to stick around for 2 years in general. I wish the organizations much luck in their future endeavors. 


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