“Signal to Noise” refers to the ratio between the desired signal – music for example – to noise like static and hiss.  On your iPod, you want more signal and less noise. And according Brian Roy, president and founder of Cosinity a firm creating communications applications Social Media is suffering from a lot of noise. Read more »

Agile Software Development is The 80/20 Rule At Work. If you work in marketing communications you know that your work product has become digital. You’ve become a software developer, like it or not.  In our 100 Day Plan  you discover that “input does not equal output.”  Or as my Dad used to say “you can work hard or you can work smart.”  And so it makes sense there are to main ways to manage projects: Plan Driven – very structured approach, emphasizes documentation, negotiation and contracting.  Think of Microsoft Project and a large pot of bad coffee. Read more »

So I’m walking Big Dog to the park and I see fresh plywood emblazoned with the words “Post No Bills”. And I think to myself “Oh yeah… really? How about “no more financial meltdown”, “no BS”, and as long as we’re at it, “no more Nigerian spam emails”? Read more »

How The 80/20 Rule and Quick Thinking Saved Apollo 13 From Burning Up in the Atmosphere. Apollo 13 was supposed to be NASA’s third manned-lunar-landing mission but things didn’t turn out well.  Two days into the mission the spacecraft was crippled by an explosion in oxygen tank #2. Read more »

Now I know this makes me a geek but I subscribe to the Multi-variate landing page optimization blog because in spite of its fierce name makes things really straight-forward for the non-statistically-inclined like me. Today I noticed a review of Avinash Kaushik Web Analytics: An Hour A Day that mentioned The 80/20 Rule which I like so well: Avinash believes that 10% of the budgets should be spent on software while 90% of it on the people and their training. Read more »