A is for AHREF

Second Cheapest Syndrome

dihard:

Ever order the second cheapest wine on the menu while dining out? Well, one in four diners do (in the UK, at least). In the marketing world, we can define this as a choice set effect with respect to reference pricing - using the cheapest bottle of wine as a standard of comparison against which the other wines are compared.

But did you know that the second cheapest bottle is usually the worst value?

“Restaurant owners will often price the wine they buy cheapest at wholesale as the second cheapest wine on the menu. Why? Because people generally don’t order the cheapest wine and thus often turn to the second cheapest. Price that one higher, and you get a bigger marginal profit. Presto — restauranteur as microeconomist!” (from a reference to an old WSJ article I can’t locate online)

** San Francisco tumblr meetup in MAY **

joelaz:

letsmeetinsf wrote:

OK it’s about time the bay area had it’s own Tumblr meetup (we gotta keep up people!) so I’ve taken initiative and created this group tumblelog so people can know tumblr happenings in SF!

I’m thinking the beginning of next month (May) for our first meetup. Happy hour on a Thursday evening? Other ideas? Zeitgeist might work….

If you are in the bay area, REBLOG THIS!! The more the merrier :) And for now (until I get the whole tumblr group thing down), email me at katy [dot] schnoor [@] gmail for an invite.

Excellent! Thanks for organizing this, Katy. I hope it’s not May 1 to 5th as I’ll be in New Orleans for Jazz Fest then.

Reblog this San Franciscans.

Which Mac Todo software is more effective at getting important work done?

Wow, seems like Macs have a ton of great software to choose from for Task Management….but has anyone tried all of them? Any clear winners?

The contestants: 

• Taskpaper
• OmniFocus
• Things

Also, anyone know more about the team from Things? Seems like a mini 37 signals in the making.

update:  Favorable review of Things

A tumblr moment

RB start: 

via rach:

I was talking to my dad recently—who has now been a surgeon for 25 years—about how he has done the same thing for so long without interruption…it doesn’t bother him that his job is not great every day, or even every month. Long hours are spent over dictations, dealing with HMOs, or listening to overzealous patients poke at their bellies and change their mind twice about where it hurts. In fact, the few chances he has each day to actually slice people open and fix them are about his only moments of zen.

And yet, he’s happy, and he credits it to thinking that what he does is important….but many friends’ career woes relate to what they are doing just doesn’t mean anything to them. It might mean something to the masses, it might mean something to their parents, it might even mean something to the person they were three years ago, but currently, their days are spent doing something they don’t find significant, at least not without three or four sentences of justification.

RB end 

Every now and then blogging/tumbling/whatever really captures a great thought or feeling from the blog’s author….something about the medium seems to bring out profound thoughts at a higher rate than other forms of communication.

This is where I link to/write about things that make me say "Wow"

Was looking at Get Excited - Ricky Van Veen’s recently redesigned Tumblr page and I liked the straightforward purpose of his site:

Hi! I’m Ricky….This is where I write about things that excite me.

Reviewing my recent comments at Disqus I should probably rename this site Get Wowed.

Where's the best place to hold a conversation online?

With the addition to comments to my Tumblr, I find myself wondering where to go to check/post comments online. Recently, Friendfeed started to offer a place to centralize all of my web activity - and it had the added benefit of an active community and a way to comment on and “like” individual links.

But now Movable Type is offereing Action Streams (ps: it’s open source) which seem to offer very similar functionality to Friendfeed.

My question is - how do I get the most engaged audience to view the content I’d like to share? Should I follow the audience and hop from tool to tool, or should I centralize all my activity under mydomain.com and just hope people come visit me there? 

RB: Know who Prince Alwaleed bin Talal is?

RB start:

Know who he is? Well you should. He’s the “Arabian Warren Buffett” (per Time magazine), a member of the Saudi Royal Family, and worth $29.5B. He also happens to be the largest single investor of Citigroup, one of the largest US financial firms.

Foreign investment into US companies was formerly ill received. Here are some examples..

• Remember the Unocal dilemma a couple years back? Unocal was to be acquired by an oil company that was 70% owned by the Chinese government. There was such opposition that the Chinese company withdrew its bid for Unocal because of “the political environment in the United States.”
• In 2006, Dubai Ports World, a government entity owned by the United Arab Emirates took over 7 US ports. There was such opposition that once acquired, the ports were immediately sold by the Dubai company.

But now no one’s putting up a fight. Namely because we need the foreign investors to give straight cash to Wall Street who recently wrote off billions (because of the subprime mess), and, thus, help our economy back to stability. We’re seeing foreign investments by sovereign wealth funds, which are government owned investment funds, left and right in an attempt to help bail out our major financial firms.

• Abu Dhabi’s government investment fund paid $7.5 billion for 4.9% of Citigroup.
• China’s fund has invested $5 billion for 9.9% of Morgan Stanley.
• Singapore has purchased 9.4% of Merrill Lynch for $4.4 billion.

So what? Why should you care that Prince Alwaleed invests in Citigroup? Well, because the revenues of the banks will fall into the hands of foreign governments, marking a shift in economic and political power from the United States to Asia and the Middle East, and perhaps the fall of the US Empire.

Interesting to note - this happened to the Ottoman Empire in the 1870s. But instead of selling off shares of the banks, as we are doing now, the Ottoman government sold off shares of the Suez Canal to European investors in order to help itself out of bankruptcy. Revenue and power was shifted from east to west as the Empire fell. Now after 150 years, we may see movement in the other direction.

— dihard

RB end

Wow, so glad I just found Dihard’s tumblr…fascinating stuff. I’m jealous I don’t share the same depth, breath on such grown-up topics.