It happens every day during my commute. I don’t take a highway or expressway during my drive, but I cross the interchange of an expressway at the edge of downtown. A few blocks from the expressway is a bridge construction project that’s taken out one another way into downtown.
Between these two inconveniences (they’re minor – this isn’t a major metro region), you’ll a dozen drivers jockeying for position. You’ll have traffic heading on and off the expressway. There’s always a truck from a distributor pulling out to block traffic. You’re likely to hit a parent stop in traffic lane to let a child out for school.
The rest of the drive is fairly empty. All of the congestion is in a really small area. That small patch of roadway determines whether I’m early, on-time, or late. The majority of the trip has no impact on the final results.
I was thinking about that as I drove to work yesterday. I knew that I’d spend the day writing and coding a monthly e-newsletter.
Research might suggest that e-mail is losing effectiveness. It’s too easy to delete (if it isn’t marked spam). The addresses in your list eventually go out of date. The information is scanned and discarded compared to interactive websites, social networks, and online communities.
(Disclaimer – we don’t spam, everyone has prior relationship with us, we process unsubscribes and opt-outs, etc.)
I’ve found our monthly e-mail is the largest driver of traffic to each of these other channels. The website hits go up. The blog views skyrocket. The clicks on Twitter and Facebook pop. It’s the reminder to our stakeholders to check in – using whichever program or format you’d like – to the institution where I work.
In other words, the three-day window of e-mail opens has a huge effect on the month traffic. What have you found?
Thanks to lynac on Flickr for the photo.
Just turned on the television, and it looks as though Armageddon has been avoided. My tv still works.
The Digital TV switchover has been sitting out there for years now. A year ago, television stations went frantic in trying to convince millions of Americans to race out for special receivers and converter boxes to avoid a blank television on February 17. A few weeks ago, Congress and the President even changed the law to delay the mandated shut-off date for broadcasting on analog. The stations in my market went ahead with the switchover today anyways. I doubt many noticed.
More than half of Americans have cable and aren’t affected. And even more have bought a television recently enough to catch the digital signals without a special piece of equipment. How many Americans might be affected? 14 percent. If they all have really old TVs. Leave No Television View Behind. (They might start reading.)
Lots of fear, because without urgency I might miss my third-rate newscast. DTV-2K. Hype overblown.
We missed a great chance to stimulate the economy today because of months and months (and months) of breathless DTV hype. We should have had broadcasting television stations make the change without any announcements. Then we might have had hundreds of thousands of Americans scrambling for new televisions today and placing calls to repairmen. The result would have been a huge spending spree and millions of dollars of retail purchases. Could have started an economic turnaround if somebody would have thought it out. Instead, those millions of purchases were spread out over 12 months – diluting their impact and leaving us to wait for small tax refunds, rebates, and reductions.
When my dad first researched our family history, he drove to remote courthouses, libraries, and archives in search of dates, documents, or other traces of the Clark family that settled in Perry County, Ohio in the early 1820s.
I recently did remote research myself. Sitting seven hours away in Scranton, Pennsylvania I checked the Ohio Historical Society’s web page to find the death certificates of most of my great grandfather’s siblings. The organization has an index of death certificates filed between 1913 and 1944. Enter the name and county, and the web site pulls the volume and certificate number from its database.
Last week, my dad got back in the car and drove two hours to the state archives. Armed with the certificate numbers that I gave him, Dad easily found microfilm copies of the death records. I got them in the mail yesterday. Deaths in 1922, 1933, 1936, and 1940.
My ancestors – and their relatives – never could have imagined that it would be possible to learn so much about them so quickly and so easily from anywhere in the world.
