Persuasion and the authority approach

Scoble has a good post on persuading through authority and not through bias. ‘Then I got to the Ford dealer. First off, he admitted that Ford had had a quality problem in the past… If he had tried to play the “my stuff is the best and the rest is crap” line, he probably would have lost the sale. Instead, he played “I’m an authority and I’m looking out for your best interests” and that hooked me. He got the sale.‘ Basically it’s about being honest, offering overwhelmingly good service, and not bashing the competition.

Some interesting comments there too, including a link to Stanford’s new Captology blog featuring BJ Fogg et al.

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Brooklyn Design Expo

Brooklyn Designs 2004 will feature designers and manufacturers of contemporary furnishings that include: furniture, lighting, linens, rugs, and decorative accessories for home, office and garden. In DUMBO from April 30 – May 2. $10

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23rd St. CSS

If you’d like to see my background art without all this useless text obscuring it, use this blank HTML page and hit reload repeatedly.

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Google Gaga

Sippey comments on the Google IPO hype, exactly what I was thinking about this morning. Yesterday I came across it in the New York Times, the Nightly Business Report, and NPR. This morning it was in the Wall St. Journal. I wonder if they all feel they got the story, or if they’ve been duped? ‘Deciding whether to IPO‘ my ass, if Google took money from Kleiner Perkins they will IPO, the hype is just spreading the word, building excitement, and raising the eventual price. Google is spinning the media like a top.

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10 Classics from Cognitive Science

PeterV links to 10 Classics from Cognitive Science, several of which look applicable to digital design. And there’s this one that is just darn cool: ‘Do systems larger than single individuals qualify as “cognitive?” In this article, Hutchins argued that they do. He supported his claim by analyzing remembering by commercial airline cockpits, considered as cognitive systems. He proposed “that rather than trying to map the findings of cognitive psychological studies of individuals directly onto the individual pilots in the cockpit, we should map the conceptualization of the cognitive system onto a new unit of analysis: the cockpit as a whole.”

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Worth while

Desperately seeking interesting business blogs to read, I came across Worthwhile, a group blog including authors David Weinberger and Tom Peters that strives to ‘put purpose and passion on the same plane as profit.‘ Amen. Also found An Entrepreneur’s Life with a sizable blogroll, and I’m off…

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eWeb Edit Pro, now with XHTML, Styles

Ahhhh, content management applications, those wonderful places where “business users” author text and where content smacks right into presentation, with the results falling short of peanut butter and chocolate. Inserting a WYSIWYG tool into the CMA – like eWeb Edit Pro was often the way to make editing easier but at the expense of clean, consistent, standards-based HTML. Now it not only supports XHTML, it supports styles too (admins can remove unwanted buttons like bold). Nice.

A similar product is editlet.

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