February 2009

links for 2009-02-25

I turned 34. True story.

rule-34-at-at1As you may have heard from such places as my Facebook wall, today is my birthday. Seeing as how it is my 34th birthday, I realize it’s my duty to remind you all of the internet rule #34 which states that “If it exists, there is porn of it. No exceptions.”

This is an important bit of information to keep in mind. Next time you start to think “I wonder if..” stop yourself right there because the answer is already yes. That has nothing to do with my birthday, but it’s just something good to keep in mind. Anytime you think something is fucked up, there is definitely something much worse which should be reassuring. Should be.

Anyway, in regards to my birthday, I’ve also already decided that the year spanning 34-35 will be even more epic than 33-34 was. And 33-34 was damn epic. I’m not yet sure if it will be win or fail, but I’m dedicated to making it epic in either situation. Won’t you join me in this righteous quest?

Unsolicited e-mail OTD: AskItOnline.com

Seriously. I just got this:

subject: Your Twitter Survey

Hello Sean,

I came across your survey today which was created with SurveyMonkey:
http://seanbonner.com/2009/02/23/twitter-survey-results/

My name is Kaitlyn McLachlan and I am the Founder and President of www.AskItOnline.com. Our service offers an extremely intuitive drag ‘n drop survey builder interface, allowing you to create powerful surveys with ease in minutes! Very recently, we have migrated all of our servers to Canada. As you are probably well aware, the Patriot Act has created a barrier for easy, efficient online research and data collection while maintaining privacy over such data. Because our servers are located in Canada, this eliminates all of the problems posed by the Patriot Act.

I hope you will consider our service as an alternative. You can read more (and signup!) at our website:
http://www.AskItOnline.com

I would be happy to address any questions or concerns you may have, so please do not hesitate to contact me!

—
Kaitlyn McLachlan
Founder & President, AskItOnline.com
www.AskItOnline.com
Email: kaitlyn@askitonline.com
Tel: (647) 299-2197

I don’t know which is better, the complete disregard for content of my survey, why you follow or unfollow someone on twitter isn’t something that generally runs into issues with the Patriot Act. The complete disregard for my choice of survey software, I mean, the fact that I wasn’t using their stuff could only be a mistake. Or the totally canned e-mail, nothing personal about it except the link to my site. The fact that the founder and prsident of this company uses this method to drum up new users is reason enough for me to keep using Survey Monkey.

Twitter Survey Results!

As you might have noticed I did a little Twitter Survey this morning. It wasn’t for any specific project and in fact was based entirely on several conversations I’d had in the past few weeks combined with simple curiosity. There wasn’t a ton of background, but everything on it I’d talked with someone about recently so I felt the need to include.

One thing to point out, two of the questions I asked required people to sort things in order of most to least in terms of how that related to them. Several people told me there was a bug with this because they could only list one thing in a column. This wasn’t a bug, it was by design. The goal of the question wasn’t about each item on it’s own, but rather how it related to the others. You can only have one most and one least, so people had to chose one that stood out on top most of all, as well as which one was the very least likely, even if they had never done several of them. It’s kind of a trick, but I wasn’t as interested in any specific answer as much as how they stacked against each other. If the results came back with 3-4 things all at 100% for least that would have been useless to me, so I forced a ranking on purpose though the rank itself is kind of meaningless. Knowhatimean?

Read More