Moving by inertia...

Last night was a tough night, from the stay-awake point of view. And while the note left by my relief told me to expect him around 9 am after a telecon, the telecon apparently concluded early, and I was on my way back home by 8 am. I puttered about for a while, ate breakfast, and then turned around and went to the dentist's office. Fortunately, I left about 20 minutes early, because unfortunately, the light at Bay Area and Highway 3 wasn't working, so it took me about those 20 minutes to edge up to the intersection and get through.

I was a full 6 minutes early for my appointment, but spent another 40 minutes sitting in the waiting room, dozing (as far as I can tell). The actual procedure to replace my temporary crown with the permanent one went quickly, and I was back on the road in no time and managed to hit the sack by about noon. I slept until about 4:30 pm, which counts as a short night in my book.

Counting tonight (there are still a hair over six hours left in my shift), I have three more nights of work during this assignment.

* * *At odd moments, I wonder whether to move my "work" web site from TextPattern to WordPress 2.0, and then realize that what I am very likely mistaking reorganization for progress.

Hmmm.

Time for a freewheel... in a completely different post.

Cheers...

The freewheel is loose! (The nut, doubtless, is responsible...)

I recently read a post at Open Culture that noted how the #3 most popular podcast at iTunes earlier this month was Coffee Break Spanish, which has experienced over a half million downloads since starting up late last year. The money quote in the post, for me, was this:

...the digital era has enabled small content providers, with little to no capital, to serve niche markets, which if taken together, can turn out to be quite large.

This is something that seems quite obvious, if you think about it for more than a second, but at the same time something... if not profound, then at least in the class of having that animated arm pop out of the screen to thwap you on the head with a wooden mallet.

The business model here involves providing a basic product that you give away and that can stand by itself well enough to earn repeat downloads, and then to offer a raft of auxiliary aids, such as bonus podcasts, documentation, flash cards, etc., which are sold to listeners (about $18 per month, in the case of Coffee Break Spanish). Although the cost of goods is negligible (in terms of having no physical product to sell), I would not be surprised to learn that a considerable amount of effort must be invested to actually generate the content.

So, I thinks to myself, how might those 500,000 downloads translate into sales?

That will depend on the size of your audience, i.e., repeat listeners. How many such people are represented by 500,000 downloads?

We are going to have to make some assumptions.

Just for laughs, let's invoke the 80-20 rule and assume that 20% of listeners are motivated enough to think "I can do this," and download an average of 8 episodes of the 10 available, and that 80% of listeners quit downloading after an average of 2 episodes and go back to watching American Idol. If you do the math, the assumption results in an overall audience size of just over 150,000 people, of whom 30,000 are motivated enough to have downloaded almost all the episodes, and zero of the remaining 120,000 souls can be expected to buy any premium content.

Now, somewhere, I have a dead-tree article wherein it is stated that almost 95% of people will not carry through on a decision that might literally save or prolong their lives (something like quitting smoking, for instance, for someone with emphysema). Let's state that a bit more starkly as: "95% of people who are motivated to do something supremely important to them will not do it."

But buying extra content is not a life-or-death decision, so, of the remaining 5% of that 30,000, I estimate that 1 in 5, and maybe - if winds be fair and the seas following- as many as 1 in 2 of that group will muster the initiative to move beyond of their comfort zone and actually take action. (If you've ever been on the receiving end of sales training, you know how important that "call to action" is. If you don't ask for the sale, you won't get it!)

So figure something between 300 and 750 people buy into the paid goodies... that's, um, between $5400 and $13500 per month, with the latter figure being fairly optimistic.

Draw your own conclusions (but remember: generating content will be a full-time job!)

(BTW, if anyone feels like pointing out an episode of rectocranial inversion on my part, please feel free to comment.)

Cheers...

Der Dativ ist dem Genetiv sein Tod...

I've been wondering about this book for a while. I picked up a copy during a layover in Frankfurt some time ago (an impulse buy of a book I can't read... now that's rich!), but nobody I've approached so far has been able to explain the title to me, so there's nothing to be done but actually take a look at some of the text. My German is, um, poor, but here's my take on the first few sentences of the book:

Ein paar Worte vorweg

Wilkommen im Todestal des Genetivs! Dieses Buch wird Ihnen als Reiseführer auf einem abenteuerlichen Rundgang durch die Wildnis der deutscher Sprache dienen. Es zeigt Ihnen, wie man sich mit der Machete einen Weg durch widerspenstiges grammatisches Gestrüpp schlagen kann, es fürht Sie um syntaktische Fallgruben herum, weist Sie auf orthographischen Treibsand hin und bringt Sie sicher übers stilistische Glatteis.

---

Two words up front

Welcome to the death valley of the genetive! This book will serve as your travel guide to an adventuresome tour through the wilderness of the German language. It shows you how you can, with a machete, hack a path through stubborn grammatical undergrowth, leads you around syntactic pitfalls, shows you where the orthographic quicksand is, and guides you easily over slick stylistic ice.

I get the feeling this is a German version of a book that Ted Bernstein might've written, on language usage.

I've taken liberties with the translation (I had to, since I don't know much German!). Suggestions/corrections welcome!

Cheers...

[UPDATE: Todestal is "death valley," as pointed out by a member of de_translate in this cross post.]

Wakeful in Webster...

I woke up around an hour ago, after about 4 hours of sleep. I plan to go for a bike ride shortly, then try to sleep for a couple of hours before going back into work.

It's "official": I called Verizon Wireless tech support to find if they could give me some pointers regarding the use of my BlackBerry's data capability via Linux, and the short answer is: no. Could they tell me what modem initialization string is used to activate the phone's modem feature? Same answer. Ah, well...

I have found some information regarding an initialization string that must be sent to the phone before dialing, and I understand the mechanism of embedding said string in a script file that is executed prior to dialing, but I just don't have the patience to go through all that now.

I'm off to go for a walk.

Cheers...