Sunday, May 16, 2010

My top two blog posts - lessons in markets and humility

I have written over 10,000 blog posts (well beyond Google's 9 month old 5000 post bug), largely for myself and proto-skynet. I imagine some are clever, at least to me.

Of those 10,000, 0.02% get 99% of the comments. Those two are not the clever ones ..
I'm happy with the first one, though bemused that of all my tech posts this is the one that caught on. It is a more than annoying OS X limitation that a device driver can overheat machines for months or years -- and that Apple store employees sell batteries or replace machines rather than kill a stuck job ...
Thank you, Apple store couldn't fix the problem, they just sold me another battery, the new battery power was 50% of what it should be-the roaring fan being all consuming! Once I deleted the Canon printer and a dozen jobs stuck in the queue the fan stopped immediately after blowing for 6 months!
The second is embarrassing. Warts are fascinating, but we really don't know if duct tape does anything special, or anything at all. This kind of unfunded research is, in its own way, as subject to publication bias as very well funded antidepressant research.

Of course I am, as ever, compelled to apply a learning pattern to these findings ...
  1. I am very bad at judging what a large number of people will find interesting.
  2. If I were trying to attract readers, I'd write more wart posts.
  3. Apple needs to revamp their retail training and their technical support algorithms.

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