The WSJ has an article about why we secretly love meetings, but publicly say we hate them.

Here is a telling quote:

David Mazel, a research analyst, thinks people like meetings because "you can stay busy without accomplishing a thing." He says "having gone to the meeting is the work."

These people scare me. People that would rather sit in a meeting room under fluorescent lighting than leave work an hour early. If you remain busy by doing nothing, wouldn't you rather do nothing outside of an office?

Personally I think most meetings stink and are held because someone with power is lonely.

"Plus, I love to talk, be seen and be heard." This was said by the founder of an apparel business.

I have a gym membership with Washington Sports Club. In 30 days I will no longer have a membership with them. The reason is simple - $39. $39 is what they charged me to change my default gym to one closer to my house. An utterly bogus charge. The gyms are roughly 1.5 miles apart. This, to Washington Sports Club, is a $39 update. An update to one line on a computer. They must be using a really fancy font for that line.

When I changed my default location I was not told about the charge. Probably because the guy updating my file realizes that is it is a BS charge and would be too embarrassed to mention. Instead I found out about this charge when I got my CC statement. Always a pleasant way to learn something. I called them and asked about my increased fee for the month. $39 because I changed my, in their nomenclature, home gym. Come on, you really gonna nickel and dime me on this? The guy on the phone, told me that this was assessed to anyone that made this change. I pointed out my long relationship with the gym, but this did not sway him. I pointed out that if I was a new customer I would not be charged this. Heck, 9 times out of 10 as new customer you can bypass all of the bogus "signup fees". He just reiterated the same line. So I asked to end my membership and he informed me I would have to do this in person.

Perhaps I have to cancel in person so they have one more opportunity to entice me to stay. Nope. I went in and cancelled my membership. No question was asked why I was leaving. No offering to keep me to stay and keep paying them. No interest in keeping the easy money I offered.

Does their policy not account for basic math skills? They billed me $39 and wound up losing $888.

An interesting study came out today titled, "New Study Shows that Heavy Clickers Distort Reality of Display Advertising Click-Through Metrics". Of course, like everything these days, it should be taken with a grain of salt. But it's findings are interesting and align with what I've wondered about for a long time, exactly who is clicking on ads? I've done this only a handful of times, but I tend to shy away from them. The reason for my click shyness is that I've been burnt by the ad that claimed great savings but only delivered pop-ups and web spam. After being assaulted by a misleading ad, like any sufferer of a great trauma, I tend to avoid the cause of that trauma again.

While I run pay per click ads on this site I wonder who clicks on them? And why would you? Most of them just don't seem relevant to any content on the site. Thanks for clicking and please keep it up, but who are you and what compels you to click is beyond me.

As an advertiser I've toyed around with pay per click ads, but never seen much value to them. Instead, and I imagine more and more advertisers will lean this way, I preferred to pay based on CPA or cost per acquisition (Google seems to like the term pay per action). As the advertiser I only pay when someone clicks on my ad and then buys my product or some other action. Paying for someone to click on the ad is just pointless. I have no interest in the ponzi scheme of "eyeballs" and I've never met a client, well a smart client, that is more interested in eyeballs than sales either. This method is more expensive but will actually result in a revenue bearing result. As such, advertisers will have to become much smarter about the ads and the user experience from seeing, clicking to purchasing.

The next few days should be interesting as I am sure that Google and their pay-per-click brethen dispute this study. Now I ask you my dear reader, do you click on ads? If so, why and when?

The WSJ has one of those "what will the future be like" articles up now. Here is a rather upsetting quote from it:

"There's no reason 10 years from now that you won't record every meeting you've been in, maybe record all of the audio or have a little video camera on your glasses," says Mr. Cutts (an engineer at Google).

Why? Why would you ever want to do this? Unless your a sociopath why would you want to do this? Who would want to be in a meeting sitting cross from the weasel with a video camera in their glasses?

Let's pretend you run a website for a group looking to save the world. The sky is falling and time is of the essence. For those of you in this role, what is your website? Is it singularly focused on the pressing issue of the day? Or is it a museum piece dedicated to archiving what you did before?

The majority of websites are not meant to be archives. Websites are not museums capturing the work of the past and making it easy for students to do their homework. Could you imagine Apple making it really easy to find the tech specs of the Apple II on their site? Do you think there is any internal discussion about the importance of the availability of the Apple II spec? After all this is the product that made Apple, shouldn't they dedicate huge swaths of their website to it? Of course not. They focus their website on what is important today.

Why would your activist site be any different in this regard. Both corporate and activist sites are in the same business - selling a product. Focus on what is current and what is now. Forget the past. The beauty of the search engine is that you can forget the past. Throw your past work in some repository that is indexed. Make your site relevant and focused on your mission today.