I went to a very fun Jeff Pulver Social Media Breakfast in D.C. recently. While I was there, I met a really interesting guy, Shashi Bellamkonda. We got to talking and before I knew it, he had convinced me (yikes!) to do a video interview.

So, for your viewing pleasure…. (thanks Shashi!)

A loyal reader asks: Thanks to you, now I get most of my news and information in an RSS feeder. I use Netvibes, by the way. Anyway, there are still lots of sites without RSS. I am so over getting email newsletters or checking sites – say the Drudge Report – every day. What can I do?

Glad you asked.

We recently found a great way to handle that. We mentioned it in our last newsletter, but you might have missed it. And it’s worth repeating. (there are others, but we think this is the bomb!)

Feedity

Feedity is a great service that creates RSS feeds for web pages without a web syndication format. It will take virtually any web page, and convert it into a fully formed RSS document. (the picture below is theirs…)

Feedity makes it so incredibly easy for anyone to set up. You can instantly track and monitor web site changes at a page level. Just create an RSS feed for the web page, and subscribe it in any RSS newsreader (on the web, in a desktop software, or via e-mail).

Feedity also provides for a simple way to build a data “pipeline” using Yahoo Pipes. Check out their Webpage-to-RSS pipe. Without it, it’s not for the meek, for sure!

Good luck.

A loyal reader asks: You’ve told us about Skinny Zips which tells you a ton about each area, but it doesn’t solve my problem today. Now I want to see where the zip code is. Help?

You’ve come to the right place. We love geo-questions!

Here’ s a great one. Check out ZCMap — the ‘ultimate’ U.S. Zip Code mapping utility. You’ll have hours of fun! We did…

I’ve been hearing a lot of good things about Keyword Discovery as an SEO tool. When I was checking it out, I looked to see what they report as the top 10 general searches. The chart below is a simplified version of their data:

So here’s what struck me. Over 13 million people plug myspace into a search engine? That means that there are 13 million people who don’t know that adding .com to that and putting it in the address bar is the way to go? Same with the 13.5 million that type google in and the almost 9 million that type yahoo in and the over 7 million for ebay and 5 million for youtube. Is it just me that thinks this is odd?

The 5.6 million who actually typed myspace.com into a search engine may be the ones I wonder about the most though.

Scratch that. Actually I wonder about the millions of people who type porn and sex into a search engine with no qualifying words. I’m guessing that these folks figure it out, though. Seems to be a category of search where users are motivated to improve their search results.

All this talk about generations made me particularly alert to this article, Five Things You Don’t Know About Baby Boomers from the National Retail Federation.

As a group, the 78 million Americans born between 1946 and 1964 is much too large and diverse to share a single lifestyle, life stage, purchasing proclivity or political agenda. And most of them are too wealthy to be ignored by marketers and retailers obsessed by youth.

Lots of stats here. And marketing ideas. And segmentation info.

All the stuff that keeps us going over here.

A reader asks: I keep hearing about Millennials, Gen Y and Echo Boomers. The topic of the day seems to be how the work force is shifting to make way for these new corporate arrivals. Why is this suddenly such a big issue? Why all the hype?

Even researchers bring in experts sometimes. So without further ado, here is the answer submitted by generational theory expert, Jessie Newburn.

There certainly is a lot of hype, and with good reason. Every time a new generation moves into their late teen and early young adulthood years, they shift the culture as they do so. Millennials are doing this now. Unfortunately, most of the “facts” floating around – even from the most credible of national news sources — are mostly inaccurate.

There’s a field of study called generational theory. It speaks to the peer personalities and archetypal life experiences of groups of people moving through time. The core source for this information is two academics: William Strauss and Neil Howe. Together, they’ve written some well-received books on the subject including Generations, Millennials Rising and The Fourth Turning. In their work, they define generational birth years by life experiences and not by the dates typically offered by U.S. demographers. The years Strauss and Howe use will probably strike you as “not true.” But here they are: Boomers are born 1943–1960. GenX are born 1961–1981. Millennials are born 1982–2002ish. Anything else is really a discussion of demographics, which is quite different than discussing generations.

What will probably shock you even more is this simple data, vetted by 2005 U.S. Census information. GenX is currently the largest generation, weighing in at 82 million Americans. Millennials are next at 79.2 million; Boomers are third, at 64.6 million; the Silent (born 1925–1942) are 33.2 million in size. The end-year for Millennials isn’t determined yet, though it is known that the newest generation is already being born. This new batch is called the Homeland Generation, and they are most likely to be a small generation, just like the Silent Gen was.

So there you have it: Facts that fly in the face of most everything you’ll ever read or hear about American generations. Me? I’ll pick data over hype any day.

Submitted by
JessieX
Generational consultant, speaker and purist.
www.jessienewburn.com