As family members keep asking me for more Who Dey updates, I keep feeling obliged to provide more and more pictures and such. If you don’t regularly read my blog, Who Dey is my new bengal kitten. You can catch up by reading and here, and here.
Ok, on to the new stuff:
Nobody seems to believe me when I say that Who Dey plays fetch, so I decided to get a little bit of proof. Here’s a picture of Who Dey bringing me her mouse to throw for her:
Of course, in today’s modern age we all want video… so, here’s a couple videos of her fetching. The first one is short so that you can see I actually threw something. The second one is about the longest distance I have in my house. Enjoy:
Apparantley WordPress won’t let me embed a video nicely, so you’ll just have to view them by clicking the links:
Short Fetch
Long Fetch
P.S. if anybody knows a good video capture card that has RCA inputs, and is really really cheap, please let me know. I have a pretty old camera, but I’d love to be able to somehow get some videos online.
February 18th, 2007
The first question I ask myself when I come across a website asking for my email address is “Why?” What’s in it for me?
It might sound selfish, but it’s true. With all the spam I get lately, there’s just no way I’m going to enter my email address into your form without seeing a direct benefit of doing so.
If you’re designing a website, this is a good rule to keep in mind. A good question to ask is: “Am I asking for this because I want it, or because I need it to deliver more value to the user?” If you don’t have a good use for information, you shouldn’t be asking for it.
Let’s look at some examples:
Just the other day, I needed to download a program called wikto. Upon clicking the official download link, I recieved the following message:
lthough SensePost releases this information at no cost, we do ask that you submit your email address and contact before downloading. This allows us to get positive feedback from the community. It also allows you, the reader, the opportunity to contribute to our research. You will be re-directed to www.sensepost.com and your username and password will be emailed to you shortly.
Reading their disclaimer you’ll see that they not only require me to enter my email address, but all the reasons they list are for their benefit. Why do I, the end user, care about giving them feedback or contributing to their research? That sounds like more work to me. I did what a lot of you might do – I created a throwaway email address to get my login information and got rid of it after that.
So how could they have improved it? For starts, offer me some value. If registering gave me access to a members only support forum, or put me on a list for upgrades and new release notifications I’d have probably given them my email address.
Let’s look at another example. This time let’s visit domaintools.com – a WHOIS site. Domaintools (formerly whois.sc) is (in my opinion) one of the best sites around for looking up domain information. It offers all kinds of powerful tools – for free!
It’s not until you perform quite a few lookups that they ask you to register. They give you a tease by offering a daily limit, and offer you unlimited lookups in exchange for creating a free account. I didn’t mind registering here, because I’d already grown accustomed to the service and I saw its value.
The trick here is to look at things from the customer’s point of view. If they see value, they’ll gladly provide you with their contact information. If you don’t really need it, then don’t ask for it.
February 18th, 2007
