Myers Briggs personality vs. being identified as gifted in school -- ENFP's are the shit!

Grew up ENTJ, then became ENFP in college. I think the big flip was becoming more humble. If you're ENTJ, you know you are better then other people. After college, I realized there are people who are better than me at most everything.

It's interesting to note this only measures whether someone is *identified* as gifted as a child. Maybe it's a mix of that extroversion and openness that causes ENFP's to be picked out by teachers. Weird to see such variance though!

Targeted adwords aren't just for ecommerce: Al Franken won in part due to nano-targeting

We nanotargeted more than 125 niche groups, with more than 1,000 pieces of creative, for less than $100,000. On Google alone, an acquisition budget of less than $20,000 got us more than 20,000 clicks, 5,500 active e-mail sign- ups, and more than 2,500 donors. We were able to reach persuasion niches (this is akin to someone opening up and reading a mail piece) for a fraction of a penny per impression, and less than 50 cents per interaction.

They targeted geographic and demographic niches online.  They tested messages to see what worked best.  Here's an example:

In real terms, Minnesotans who were searching for cheap gas or researching fuel-efficient cars saw ads about Franken’s plan to lower gas prices.

They worked on every conceivable niche group with online ads tracking what worked and what didn't.  What ads convinced viewers to click on them and view the message from the campaign.  What messages from the campaign convinced viewers to donate and/or volunteer.

So the long tail is real and so are online ads? Neat.

Page Speed to influence PageRank: Goldmine for web software engineers!

Matt Cutts, a software engineer and an eloquent corporate spokesman for Google, spoke at PubCon earlier this month and later gave a video interview to Web Pro News, in which he said that the speed at which web pages are available might become a factor in SEO moving into 2010. He said that because many within Google consider fastness to be vital to the web, the company is considering making web site speed a factor in calculating page rankings.

Wow, this would be brilliant. It would also give a lot of engineers reason to get paid more to make sure the site works fast.

And any idea that gets engineers more money, I'm for. Woo.

Working from home rocks. Rescuetime team worked from home and got half a man-month out of it!

It doesn’t look like much, but 5 people logged an extra 75 hours in a month, with the vast majority of those extra hours being productive development or design hours (about 63 extra dev/design hours were logged in the working from home month).

At posterous we are doing 3 day a week in-the-office, 2 days from home. Less interruptions = way more coding time. I pulled an all-nighter and got some gnarly architecture work done yesterday that there is NO way I could have gotten done in such a small amount of time if I knew I had to live on a normal schedule and get into the office the next day!

30% of success is willingness to take risks

He explained that success in ski racing, or most sports for that matter, was only 40% physical training. The other 60% was mental. And of that, the first 30% was technical skill and experience. The second 30% was the willingness to take risks. With ski racing, specifically, that meant taking the risk of leaning harder into turns, balancing at a steeper angle to the slope, and placing greater pressure on the outside ski edge – all of which increased the chance of falling. My coach explained, though, that if I wasn’t falling at least once a day in training, I wasn’t trying hard enough. Indeed, to improve at anything, we must at some point push ourselves outside our comfort zone. Body builders call it the “pain period.” Only by trying something new, struggling, learning, and then trying again do we improve our performance.