The Jason Salas Experience

A few weeks back I interviewed my friend Leo Babauta on my station's live television talk show.  We discussed, among other things, the mammoth following his blog ZenHabits has amassed in a fairly short amount of time.  His site offers suggestions on topics such as self-help, healthy living, stress management, increasing productivity and lifehacking.  With such a diverse scope and relevance to anyone willing to consider its teachings, ZenHabits has built up quite the sizable fan base. 

Leo can boast about having nearly 79,000 users subscribing to his RSS feed, better than 4,500 people following him on Twitter and scores more befriending him on Facebook.  Leo's site traffic outpaces that of TV news affiliates for Guam and Honolulu.  He's constantly a happy victim to The Digg Effect, and referenced in perpetuity by mavens like Steve Rubel.  His readership now almost eclipses the circulation of the newspaper where he previously worked.  The revenue he earns from AdSense allowed him to quit his day job and support his family by blogging full-time.  His digital labors even gave rise to a real world spin-off product, landing him a book deal.

All of these metrics are unprecedented for a small market like Guam.

His achievements and rise to prominence as a constantly bookmarkworthy destination is a classic case of a local boy done good...by not staying local. 

I have fun everyday doing neat things at KUAM.com with content delivery, pushing our local news coverage out in a ton of different formats and over a variety of digital devices, but I always eventually reach a point where I can't expand our audience anymore.  With our target audience being those interested in what happens in Guam, the interest in our information is finite, and with Guam being a small market, with a set scope. 

Guam's got about 150,000 residents living here without about that same number of ex-pats scattered across the globe.  We've satisfied as many people as can be and that's it - at some point our exposure inevitably taps out.  So much to my chagrin I'm forced to live with the burden of limited reach.

Leo's secret sauce is that he broadened the scope of relevance of his information by not confining it to a specific community.  His posts, not unlike the Zen his domain preaches, are universal in their appeal.  He's made a living for himself by writing about things everyone can enjoy.

I was reminded of the power of having a truly global audience this past May in covering Guam's participation in the Clinton/Obama presidential caucus.  With Guam 17 hours ahead of the U.S. East Coast all eyes were on us, so our web traffic saw a spike unlike anything before.  Over the next 40 hours KUAM.com served up more page requests than it ever had in any previous month, and that included that past January - itself a record-setting period due to a local election and the accompanying aftermath.  Our traffic quadrupled that previous high water mark because the world, even if for a fleeting moment, took interest in what was happening out here. 

Immediately after our load returned to normalcy and we resumed serving our prime userbase, operating in our little predictable sandbox.  But it was one of those rare times when we were able to truly tap the global online audience.  For a moment, I got a glimpse of what eBay, Yahoo!, Amazon, Google and the other web heavyweights go through each and everyday with tons of people logging on from everywhere.  Various events have drawn such surges in visitations (i.e., military accidents, visits by delegates, odd and offbeat headlines, etc.), but those are rare.

So I appreciate and applaud Leo for his ability to sustain success and grow his audience.  I'm incredibly proud someone from our island has attained such notoriety and is rightfully reaping rewards for his efforts.  Being able to build an online business by taking advantage of the 'Net's worldwide connectedness - a theory so often taught in web marketing but so rarely actually put into practice - makes for a great case study.

Leo's figured out that the key is building community while not being trapped to the limitations of infrastructure, platform or geography.  Make that happen for your own project and you've got yourself a winner.

// posted by Jason Salas @ 11:00 PM 2 Comments Links to this post

Last night during my company's Christmas party I enjoyed a delightful conversation talking shop with Jay Shedd, the CEO of the local DoCoMo installation.  As we each beat our proverbial chests by running down various entrepreneurial ideas we've come up with over the years, I mentioned several of the R&D initiatives I've got in the hopper, including a Web 3.0 application I've recently been mentally cobbling.

I passionately described a mobile service I'm keen on building that leverages artificial intelligence and embedded devices to allow a user to capture a headline, image or video of a news event on their cameraphone, which then queries a semantic database and returns hyperlinks to text, audio, image and video exhibits of all coverage of that event from sources throughout the world (mainstream media as well as the blogosphere). 

The app would smartly recognize the context in which the inbound media was submitted and sniff out appropriate matching entries, sensitive to the time they were stored so the user gets an up-to-the-second experience of how the world's media corps, old and new, is covering and responding to various events. 

Think of such a framework, I postulated, as a powerful archive of constantly updated/logically organized data, masked behind a stupidly simple front-end.  Google News meets Compare Everywhere meets Techmeme.

I'm fortunate that Jay, having a technical green thumb, was able to follow along for most of my dissertation, although I know I lost him when I started in on the need for data-describing-data semantics as the next generation drivers for software as a service platforms.

"And you think you can do this?" was the executive's penultimate response, followed by, "Jason, so what are you doing here on Guam?", implying that such ideas would be more successful in the lucrative rolling hills of Silicon Valley.  And he's right, of course.

But while most would-be idea-mongers might leap at the prospect of being the beneficiary of such an ad hoc endorsement to launch the Next Great Platform in the Mecca of the technical frontier, it bums me out that I can't take such ideas to profitability in my own hometown.  Location, location, location.

What am I still doing here?  Yeah, I get that a lot.

// posted by Jason Salas @ 10:19 PM 0 Comments Links to this post

One of the people in my apartment building had a pretty dreadful accident yesterday.  As I quietly tended to my laundry Christmas Night I heard a sickening thud followed by a slow, prolonged moan - loud enough to resonate above the churning of twin industrial-strength washing machines.

Now understand that I've heard a lot in the almost three years I've holed up in my current digs.  I've had to audibly witness a lot from the various rotational neighbors with whom I've co-habitated - everything from the most descriptively detailed lovemaking sessions, to perpetually crying kids, to an AIDS activist belting out show tunes late at night, to low-grade spousal abuse, to strippers spraying Silly String while nakedly chasing each other around the complex, to overly-profane lesbians drunkenly pontificating about why Tupac Shakur died.  

So I've gotten accustomed to tuning out stuff that's none of my business.

So when I walked with my empty basket back to my unit I saw out of the corner of my eye a person at the bottom of the stairwell, having taken what appeared to be a violent fall.  This poor man clung to the railing with his lower extremities grossly bent in ways that would make even the most accomplished circus contortionist blush.  

Being a mild acquaintance, I instantly dropped my stuff and rushed to help, asking this person if they knew where they were and if they recognized who I was (instinctively recalling the first-aid class in took in college to check for shock).  Stumbling in and out of conversation the respondent said, "No, I'm fine...wait...yeah.  I'm good.  No...alright...yep …I'm pretty sure I broke my leg."

Grasping the individual I started to pick him up - at which point he freaked.  "No, never mind!  I don't want to be in the news!  I don't wanna be on TV!" the person repeated.  I said I wouldn't, and he insisted he was fine; he'd just need to make it up two more flights of stairs on his own and all would be kosher, he theorized.  He became afraid and embarrassed at my attempt to help ease his suffering.  I asked if I could at least hail an ambulance and sit with him, which got him more panicked. 

It was at that moment I noticed the beer can he gripped even tighter than the rail.  He wasn't just tipsy - he was crazy inebriated.  Coherent enough to remember me and consciously resist assistance, but not enough so to know he was in pretty bad shape.  

Not wanting to exacerbate his situation, I begrudgingly complied, and returned to my condo.  I came back out five minutes later, returning to empty stairs.  Thank God, he made it.  (At least I hope he did.)

The bottom-line: he refused my help because I was me - a TV personality - and he didn't want his misfortune to be exhibited in mass media for public dissemination.  He would rather suffer than risk humiliation.  He feared being on the wrong end of schadenfreude.  

That prospect honestly never entered my mind.  I was admittedly out of my element, but wanted to help a fellow human being in a spot of trouble.

I'm not saying who the victim was; pointing him out has no merit.  I write about it here only because I genuinely hope he's OK.

// posted by Jason Salas @ 2:23 PM 0 Comments Links to this post