Blogger Struggling?

From Buzz Marketing with Blogs:

Google’s Blogger Stumbles

InfoWorld’s reporting that Google’s Blogger faces performance problems.  Interestingly, Infoworld got the story how? Because Blogger blogged about it.

We have a client who uses Blogger, and has been having issues updating her site for the past several weeks, on and off, especially during peak times.

If you host your own blog, you may not have the redundancy and capacity of the bigger hosted blog solutions.  But as the recent outages at LiveJournal and Typepad show, hosted services often have problems, too.

Bottom line: you’ll have better control if you host it yourself, but there’s no guarantees in life.

I got profoundly irritatated with Blogger when I used it. I would slways recommend hosting your own site, preferably using a system hosted there, too, like WordPress.

Improbable Research

From The Guardian:

The strange case of the homosexual necrophiliac duck pushed out the boundaries of knowledge in a rather improbable way when it was recorded by Dutch researcher Kees Moeliker.

It may have ruffled a few feathers, but it earned him the coveted Ig Nobel prize for biology awarded for improbable research, and next week he will be recounting his findings to UK audiences on the Ig Nobel tour.

Ducks behave pretty badly, it seems. It is not so much that up to one in 10 of mallard couples are homosexual – no one would raise an eyebrow in the liberal Netherlands – but they regularly indulge in “attempted rape flights” when they pursue other ducks with a view to forcible mating. “Rape is a normal reproductive strategy in mallards,” explains Mr Moeliker.

As he recounts in his seminal paper, The first case of homosexual necrophilia in the mallard anas platyrhynchos, he was in his office in the Natuurmuseum Rotterdam, when he was alerted by a bang to the fact a bird had crashed into the glass facade of the building. “I went downstairs immediately to see if the window was damaged, and saw a drake mallard (anas platyrhynchos) lying motionless on its belly in the sand, two metres outside the facade. The unfortunate duck apparently had hit the building in full flight at a height of about three metres from the ground. Next to the obviously dead duck, another male mallard (in full adult plumage without any visible traces of moult) was present. He forcibly picked into the back, the base of the bill and mostly into the back of the head of the dead mallard for about two minutes, then mounted the corpse and started to copulate, with great force, almost continuously picking the side of the head.

“Rather startled, I watched this scene from close quarters behind the window until 19.10 hours during which time (75 minutes) I made some photographs and the mallard almost continuously copulated his dead congener. He dismounted only twice, stayed near the dead duck and picked the neck and the side of the head before mounting again. The first break (at 18.29 hours) lasted three minutes and the second break (at 18.45 hours) lasted less than a minute. At 19.12 hours, I disturbed this cruel scene. The necrophilic mallard only reluctantly left his ‘mate’: when I had approached him to about five metres, he did not fly away but simply walked off a few metres, weakly uttering a series of two-note ‘raeb-raeb’ calls (the ‘conversation-call’ of Lorentz 1953). I secured the dead duck and left the museum at 19.25 hours. The mallard was still present at the site, calling ‘raeb-raeb’ and apparently looking for his victim (who, by then, was in the freezer).”

Mr Moeliker suggests the pair were engaged in a rape flight attempt. “When one died the other one just went for it and didn’t get any negative feedback – well, didn’t get any feedback,” he said.

His findings have provoked a lot of interest – especially in Britain for some reason – but no other recorded cases of duck necrophilia. However, Mr Moeliker was informed of an American case involving a squirrel and a dead partner, although in this case it is not known whether the necrophilia observed was homosexual or not as the victim had been run over by a truck shortly before the incident.

Another quiet few days

Not much happened over the weekend, spent a lot of time helping out with the Elmcroft Associates website.

Other than that, didn’t get near the computer at the weekend. Plenty of stuff to catch up on…

Viral Marketing Manifesto

From Scoble.

1) Make sure the “brand” you’re building in people’s heads matches what you actually want people to think about.

2) To have something go viral, you actually need to do something that will make people talk. Games that are fun are generally good, but won’t work for all products. With Honda their “cog ad” for the Accord went viral and that was only a video.

3) Be sensitive to the leading “connectors” — they’ll be the ones who’ll really kick off your viral campaign. Convince them to link and you’re really on your way. Know who the connectors are in the communities you want to reach. Want a political community to talk to you? Glenn Reynolds. Gadget freaks? Engadget or Gizmodo. Tech Geeks? Dave Winer, Boing Boing, MetaFilter, or Slashdot. Etc.

4) Test the campaign with 40 leading connectors before embarrassing yourselves. Listen to the feedback you get.

5) Make sure that the viral thing matches the image you’re trying to build. A VW ad (not commissioned by VW) went viral, but because it used a terrorist blowing himself up it didn’t match the image that VW was trying to build for itself.

6) A good test is whether employees like it or not. These things can be used to increase morale. “Look at my cool company, they even have cool viral campaigns.” But, they can decimate morale too. “What a lame campaign.” Be careful here. Ask coworkers if they would be proud of sending this to mom.

7) A good viral campaign lets those who talk about it manipulate the campaign. If it is designed to manipulate those who are talking about it, be wary. We hate being manipulated, but we love to manipulate. Translation: can I add something to the campaign? Even a comment of my own? If it’s a game, does it listen to me, like the Subservient Chicken does?

8) Be wary of doing fake blogs. That gets bloggers fur to curl up. You might get away with it (ILoveBees, for instance, did) but if done poorly you’ll just get derided for your fake campaign. Be especially wary when what you’re advertising is actually real-life stuff. Search engines and blogs, for instance, need campaigns that accentuate the image of “reliable, trustworthy, always up, relevant to real life, etc.”