Trent Hamm

Pandora…

I’ve been using Pandora a ton over the past several months.  The thing that has blown my mind is that I’ve had two stations evolve into nearly the same sound due to my “thumbs up” and “thumbs down” voting.  If you had told me six months ago I would be listening to a boatload of The Cranberries, I would have looked at you like you were crazy.

Slowing Down? I Want Your Thoughts

Recently, a reader wrote to me with the following comments:

I am a fairly new subscriber to your daily newsletters… though a lot of your information I find interesting, useful and insightful, it is overwhelming the number of subjects you try to discuss and the length of these “newsletters”. If I received them once a week at this length, I might not feel this way, but with them being daily and so lengthy and packed, its is way too much for me. I am a business owner and employee also and my days are extremely packed with tasks… though I want to learn and grow in many areas, I am almost to the point of unsubscribing from your newsletters because it takes too much time to read and absorb your information. I find it frustrating…they end up stacking up in my inbox. As someone trying to stay on top of things, this is not helpful. Would you consider shortening these newsletters or keeping to one topic per an email? If not, you will loose a customer.

Over the last year or so, I’ve received perhaps a hundred similar messages that basically say the same thing: the amount of daily content from The Simple Dollar is overwhelming to them, making it difficult for them to enjoy. 

At the same time, I also know that a lot of readers quite enjoy the pace that I currently write at - and I also know that in the past, I used to post much more often than I do now.

There’s more to it that that as well.  The Simple Dollar operates mostly through attracting new readers via Google searches, and the most efficient way for me to do that is to consistently produce more content.  Almost all of my ad revenue comes not from the regular readers, but from people who find articles via Google searches and visit the site for the first time (or have freshly visited again after a hiatus) as well as readers who are new visitors brought to the site by readers who refer them here.  This site is ad-supported because I do not, nor will I ever, charge readers for the content and I need some mechanism (obviously) to keep food on the table and pay my mortgage.  

So, from a financial standpoint, there’s value in continuing to write at my current pace, as it slowly increases the number of people coming in from Google.  There’s also value in reducing my pace, because that would (theoretically) increase the number of regular readers who would then pass along key articles to friends and relatives.

What would I do with the extra time if I slowed down?  I’d likely plan and launch a second blog, likely on a very different topic than The Simple Dollar.  I don’t know what form that would take as, honestly, I haven’t thought about it thoroughly yet.  I do know that I love to write and I’m happy with the amount of content I write on a given day, so I would want to find new channels for that.  (I have considered doing this new blog somewhat as an exercise in how to launch one, given what I’ve learned with The Simple Dollar, with the possible result of publishing a book or a detailed e-book on how to do it.)

What about guest or staff writers so that you could do both?  I’m very hesitant to go down that path for a big number of reasons.  First of all, I feel that adding writers seriously dilutes the voice and connection between me and you.  I love supporting other voices, don’t get me wrong, but I support them by encouraging them to start their own sites and by linking to them and encouraging my readers to see what they have to say.  Second, my time investment in terms of maintaining quality and dealing with writer’s issues would add up to a significant amount on its own and I’d far rather be writing and communicating with fans than being a manager.  I won’t say “never” to this idea, but it doesn’t feel like the right kind of fit.

Unless there is a strong compelling case to do otherwise, I will probably leave The Simple Dollar unchanged in terms of article frequency.  But I’m also interested in seeing what readers have to say about this, so I’m putting these notes up on TrentHamm.com and linking this article out on Facebook and Twitter.

Three Netflix Instant Queue Recommendations

Three Netflix Instant Queue Recommendations Thank you to all of you who wrote in over the past few weeks offering up ideas. Here are three amazing and somewhat-less-than-mainstream things I’ve found on there and watched since the baby’s been born. Link goes straight to Netflix, so no excuses for not larding up your queue with this stuff.

Man on Wire (amazing documentary concerning Philippe Petit’s walk on a tightrope between the twin towers of the World Trade Center in 1974)
Primer (excellent “undiscovered” film about garage engineering, broken friendships, and time travel)
The IT Crowd: Series 1 (Britcom about the incredibly unglamorous life of IT workers)

Summer 2010 reading list

Judging by the weather (not by that lying calendar), summer is here. So, as usual, I have a summer reading list. Here are twenty books I plan on reading for personal enjoyment/enrichment before fall arrives.

1. The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver
2. The Big Short by Michael Lewis
3. The Children’s Book by A. S. Byatt
4. Freedom by Jonathan Franzen
5. Shades of Grey by Jasper Fforde
6. The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet by Reif Larsen
7. The Beautiful Struggle by Ta-Nehisi Coates
8. Atonement by Ian McEwan
9. Austerlitz by W. G. Sebald
10. Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
11. Wonder Boys by Michael Chabon
12. The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga
13. Netherland by Joseph O’Neill
14. The Progress Paradox by Gregg Easterbrook
15. American Nerd by Benjamin Nugent
16. The Savage Detetives by Roberto Bolano
17. The First Tycoon by T. J. Stiles
18. Tinkers by Paul Harding
19. Little Brother by Cory Doctorow
20. The Book of Basketball by Bill Simmons

I keep a “what I’m reading / what I’ve read” list going over at Goodreads, if you’re interested.

To the vaccine crusaders, birthers, and 9/11 truthers out there…

There’s one simple truism for evaluating and using information you find on the internet -or anywhere else, for that matter. Regardless of whether it’s true or not, if there’s money to be made saying something, someone out there will be saying it. That simply means that you owe it to yourself to dig deeper and get lots of sources and alternative perspectives and evidence on any idea you hold to be true.

If your ideas stand up to lots of different sources and perspectives, great.

If they don’t, then reconsider your views, or at least reconsider your evangelism of those views to others.

I’m currently debating whether or not to buy Adobe CS5 Design Premium.  I can afford it and it’d (obviously) be a tax-deductible work purchase.  I have uses for almost every piece of software in the package.

But the price tag is utterly, utterly painful.

Funny Instant watch series on Netflix

“The IT Crowd” is a British comedy series about IT professionals. If you haven’t seen it, it would be a good one to watch.

The Facebook experience

Join Facebook.

Look up a few people you’re interested in finding out what happened to.  Friend them.

Get friend requests from tons more people that you sort of vaguely remember from five or ten or fifteen years ago.  Wonder whether you should friend them.  Friend them.

Read mountains of updates from people you now have very little in common with.  In some cases, wonder what is wrong with these people.

Quietly de-friend most of the people you were friends with.

Realize you now know plenty about most of the people you wanted to catch up with.

Stop using Facebook.

My wife is nine months pregnant. I have a cold so bad I’m wheezing like a chainsmoker. Someone has to mow the lawn.

…

Time to fire up the mower and the oxygen tank.

Short point: People use too many words and sentences to communicate simple ideas.  I just received three paragraphs telling me to simply sign an attached document and send it.  Plus, the attachment actually explained what I needed to do within itself.

Shorter: The fewer words you use to clearly convey a point, the more useful your message is.

Even shorter: fewer words, more meaning.

When you need to pound a nail, you’re a lot better off spending fifteen minutes looking for a hammer than spending an hour trying (and failing) to pound that nail with your forehead.