Interview with Wow Creator: Grammar Girl, Mignon Fogarty

Mignon Fogarty, aka the Grammar Girl, took her podcast to #1 on iTunes in January 2007! Giving the world on-target grammar advice, she's become quite a celebrity in the world of podcasts. As such, I'm thrilled to have had the opportunity to interview Mignon about her success. Anyone interested in podcasting has much to learn from this savvy young woman.

Here's an excerpt from that interview:

CreateAWow: Can anyone start their own podcast? What advice or resources would you recommend for someone who wants to learn how to create podcasts?

Grammar Girl: I do think that anyone can start their own podcast as long as they have the time and desire to read up on all the tools that are avaiable.

When I started my initial podcast, Absolute Science, I knew a lot about web technology and new media, but I didn't know anything about audio technology. I just started Googling around about podcasting and hanging out in podcasting forums like the Podcast Pickle where I picked up a lot of great tips and found people who could answer my questions when I got stuck. I started with free software programs and inexpensive microphones and headphones that I already owned and then upgraded my equipment as I became more serious about podcasting. So by the time I started Grammar Girl, I knew what I was doing and hit the ground running. After it became clear there were a lot of people listening, I felt more of a responsibility to make the sound quality as good as I possibly could, so I've upgraded more of my equipment and continue to tweak my set up.

CreateAWow: What were some of the milestones along the way? Pivotal points where you saw impressive growth in your listener base?

Grammar Girl: Getting featured at iTunes the first time created a big traffic spike. After that, the growth was solid and steady until the show was featured on CNN.com -- that caused traffic to grow about 50% overnight.

For the complete interview, go here.

WOW! It's All In Your Perspective

I saw this story in today's edition of Insight of the Day and thought it conveyed a key attribute of Wow Creators - it illustrates how they look at life and why they are successful:

WOW!

Last spring I was walking in a park. A short distance ahead of me was a mom and her three-year-old daughter. The little girl was holding on to a string that was attached to a helium balloon.

All of a sudden, a sharp gust of wind took the balloon from the little girl. I braced myself for some screaming and crying.

But, no! As the little girl turned to watch her balloon go skyward, she gleefully shouted out, "Wow!

I didn't realize it at that moment, but that little girl taught me something.

Later that day, I received a phone call from a person with news of an unexpected problem. I felt like responding with "Oh no, what should we do?" But remembering that little girl, I found myself saying, "Wow, that's interesting! How can I help you?"

One thing's for sure - life's always going to keep us off balance with its unexpected problems. That's a given. What's not preordained is our response. We can choose to be frustrated or fascinated.

No matter what the situation, a fascinated "Wow!" will always beat a frustrated "Oh, no."

So the next time you experience one of life's unexpected gusts, remember that little girl and make it a "Wow!" experience. The "Wow!" response always works.

Rob Gilbert
Editor of "Bits & Pieces"

WOW Quote to Live By

"Doubters do not achieve; skeptics do not contribute; cynics do not create."

- John Calvin Coolidge, U.S. President

Wow Site of the Week - Flixter

As a Web developer, every now and again, I run into a site that makes me go "Wow! I wish I'd thought of that!" or "Wow! I wish I knew how to program something like that." Today an associate invited me to take a movie quiz at www.Flixter.com. The site lets you share movie recommendations with your friends, or find new friends based on similar movie tastes.

But it's more than that. You get your own profile where you can list your favorite movies, actors, etc. Plus you can create "widgets" to add to your blogs or myspace. A widget can be a link to your reviews and profile or a widget might be a "movie poster" or "actor poster" that you create by selecting your favorite movies and actors (see mine on the left of this blog).

It's intuitive, easy to use and extremely visual: drag and drop. You can easily add graphics of your favorite movies and photos of actors to your profile or posters.

The main thing I didn't like about the site is that it's almost too automated. To tell friends about the site, it asks you to select your email provider - Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail, or AOL. Then it lists your address book from whichever one you chose and lets you check off the email addresses of the people you'd like to invite. Handy, but what if you don't use these services? Or don't use them enough to have all your contacts in their address books? I usually use MS Outlook and rarely use my Yahoo account. But I was forced to select Yahoo, which only has a few email addresses in it. So I couldn't tell a lot of people that I wanted to about the service (at least not with their tell-a-friend script). I couldn't find any way to add an email address that's not in my Yahoo address book (short of going to Yahoo and adding it and coming back to Flixter... yuck!) Maybe I just missed it, but it wasn't obvious.

Also, the widget that links to your profile and shows your latest movie reviews requires that you leave a comment on a movie and seems to take a little while to kick in. It was about 30 minutes before it stopped showing "Doh! There are currently no reviews to show" and started showing my comments on movies instead.
Overall it's a nifty site and you could spend (or waste) hours (depending upon how you look at it) playing around on it. The programming and graphics are definitely a WOW! Kudos to the creators.

What Is the New York Times Best Seller List?

According to Wikepedia, "The New York Times Best Seller List is a weekly chart in The New York Times that tracks the week's best-selling books in the United States." It started in April 1942. "Unlike some subsequent lists of best sellers, The New York Times list is not based upon total sales figures, but instead upon surveys of a selected sample of retail booksellers." For example, Barnes and Noble and Amazon are counted, but your small mom-and-pop bookstore probably isn't. "The list is divided into Fiction and Non-Fiction sections, which each contain fifteen titles."

"While some believe a book is only truly successful if it appears on the list, the Times maintains that the list is simply that, with no assumption as to its intrinsic value. Nevertheless, some have accused publishers of marketing books in a manner designed to place them on the list. Examples include the works by L. Ron Hubbard, Battlefield Earth and Mission Earth.

Similarly, some listed books are flagged with a dagger (†) indicating that a significant number of bulk orders had been received by retail bookstores. Since it is normally more economical to place bulk orders for classroom or resale use through wholesalers or publishers, this might indicate that the purchases were made to increase a book's placement in the best seller list." (In other words it might be possible to buy your way onto the list? Hmm... wonder how many books that would take? Sounds like a chunk-o-change to me!)

"In 2001, a separate section of the best seller list was created to track the sale of children's books. Some have contended that the children's book list was created especially so that the Harry Potter book series, which dominated the list for over two years, could be moved to a separate section and other titles allowed to appear on the list."

If you're interested in seeing the current New York Times Best Seller List, go here.