The Life and Times of David Chen

Those of you who read this blog may know that I run a podcast at Always Watching called The Watchers. We also broadcast Tuesday nights at 10 pm EST at our uStream page. uStream is a pretty fantastic service but one of the biggest challenges in using it is figuring out how to attract viewers to your show.

Over at the uStream blog, Matt and Bryan have written up some pretty great ideas about how to attract a following but I think they don’t emphasize one thing enough: Creating great content. On Always Watching, we’ve had some success with social news sites like Digg and aggregators such as i-am-bored. If you want to attract new viewers, one way is to time your content so that it gets popular around the time that your show broadcasts.

How does this help? Taking our site as an example, we embed the uStream window into all of our pages, so that when people come to any of our site’s pages, they’ll see us when we’re broadcasting. Out of the thousands that will visit one of our articles, it’s very possible that a small fraction of them will click on the uStream embed. When they do, that’s another potential viewer for your show!

As useful as this might be, tread carefully and above all else, DO NOT USE THE AUTOPLAY FEATURE. The last thing you want to do is to irritate potential viewers. But if they click on it of their own free will, that’s totally up to them, no?

Over at Always Watching, I’ve written a post about kinematic typography, giving some of the best examples of the phenomenon on the web. The post was picked up by Neatorama, Metafilter, Gorillamask, and Digg. Read the rest of this entry »

The DVD of No Country for Old Men was released this past Tuesday. To celebrate this, arguably the Coen brothers’ finest work (and certainly its most award winning-est), Geeks of Doom has put together a round table of reflections on the Coen Brothers’ best films. Read the rest of this entry »

[Update: This post has been linked to by The Consumerist. Welcome everyone, and thanks for taking a look!]

When an order arrives from a company, they are afforded an excellent opportunity to make a good impression with their packaging. Companies like Amazon and Woot have packaging that is instantly recognizable yet refreshingly utilitarian. But sometimes, a company’s packaging job can go awry.

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(Photo by Ewan, via CC)

For too long, this blog has languished - what was originally supposed to be Dave Chen’s reflections on marketing has been left without any updates for months on end. No more, I say. Read the rest of this entry »

What are the effects of Costco’s return policy from a consumer perspective? Let’s take a look. Read the rest of this entry »

(Photo by flickr user Everydaylifemodern, via CC)

Brian Wansink from Cornell University has a new book out called “Mindless Eating.” Wansink tries to explored what exactly it is that drives us to eat and has found that it’s not always hunger. But Wansink’s findings may indicate more general and applicable truths about the human psyche. Read the rest of this entry »

Business Week has a story this week about AT&T’s attempt to rebrand itself, after essentially ditching the Cingular brand name. But its continuous reinvention points to the struggle the telecom giant is having in figuring out what its brand should be. Read the rest of this entry »

(Photo by batiskafo and used through Creative Commons)

According to The New York Times, Nokia is prepping for its third entry into the handheld games market, a gaming service named after its relatively unsuccessful N-Gage device. The fact that Nokia is retaining the N-Gage brand presents interesting issues as it tries to grab market share in this maturing area of gaming. Read the rest of this entry »