everwas

a blog by Ian Kennedy

Year: 2013

  • Online Advertising is just TV?

    Here’s the plan: Publishers, take every banner ad off of your site. Not just the ones you stuffed at the bottom on the page that nobody sees anyway. Remove each and every single one. Replace those small, ugly boxes with a full-screen, 30-second video interstitial to be displayed on every third page viewed per customer session. Sell the value of that video ad to marketers based on the quality of your content and the strength of your audience. Now, repeat after me: The ads do not need to have a click through to the advertiser’s website. The ad can be skipped by your reader/viewer after 10 seconds of play time.

    – Here’s how to fix digital advertising

    Is it really that simple? Doesn’t this just make every website into a triple digit, late-night cable TV channel?

  • Specialty Coffee around the World

    Specialty Coffee around the World

    The New York Times has a piece about the San Francisco coffee scene, specifically the barista training upstairs from the local temple of the perfect cup, Sightglass.

    While the West Coast style of brewing is making it’s way to Japan in places like Shibuya, Japan has it’s own professional brewing method which they take very seriously. It’s called siphoning.

  • Struggling is a given and struggling can be good

    Struggling is a given and struggling can be good

    Nice post over on my dad’s blog about the difference between learning in Japan and learning in America,

    When that one boy is applauded for struggling to learn, the teacher gave the lesson that anyone struggling to learn deserves to be applauded. The lesson was that struggling is a chance to show that you have what it takes emotionally to overcome the problem by having the strength to persist through that struggle. Simply put, struggling is a given and struggling can be good.

    – At school in Tokyo