The Hatchery

Let’s see if we can cook up an interesting post on a topic such as brands. It’s a gold mine for anecdotes and an interesting topic all around.

One good angle angle I can think of off the top of my head is branded bottled water. According to a lot of tests and surveys bottled water doesn’t taste any better and isn’t even any healthier than tap water. In some places it’s the other way round. Evian costs $21 per gallon (5,67$ / litre) and I don’t think that’s even the most expensive brand anymore.

When you go to a public restroom you are faced with a simple yet important choice: which stall to use. Ideally you’d always end up on the cleanest toilet available but since you don’t want to make a comparison with any of your senses, your best choice is to outsmart the competition and pick the cleanest one straight away using behavioral psychology.

Now, your first instinct is always wrong, that’s for sure. If you go with the booth you like best, it’s very likely it’s one of the more popular ones at the scene. See, it’s a mind game. A lot of the “players” aren’t aware they’re playing so that makes things a bit easier. If they did, it’d be like buying a wedding gift without a gift list: everyone tries to think of a gift nobody else will bring and behold - the least obvious choices become the most common. If most people use the same tactic then a rarer one will lead to victory and a clean toilet. In this case I think the most common tactic is “don’t think about it, just walk in and sit down”.

Do you take the one closest to the door or farthest from it? If there’s 3 booths in a row and one on the other side, how do you treat the lone booth? Discuss

So far we know they can be used to hijack wlans (something like that), as a weapon, as raw material for a poor mans fleshlight…

Listing the most offensive websites out there would be interesting but I don’t think promoting them is such a good idea. Instead I thought I’d make up some imaginary ones for a funny and provoking post. I still like the idea but I don’t know if the post would really fit on my blog. I already had some ideas for the sick sites and I’ll post them here as soon as I find the memo

Another thing that would be cool is a carnival of the politically incorrect.

by Eugene Assrifle is the next Fonzie

A civilization style tongue-in-cheek scoreboard for modern nations would be fun. We’d list major cultural achievements, military victories and so on over the centuries and sum up the score.

You can go on blogging for ages with ok material and nobody notices you. On the other hand one good piece might bring you tons of visitors, some of which might like your other stuff and subscribe.

Really good articles, ones that get linked to and passed around to friends, often require lot’s of research. On top of that a great idea, good excecution and some footwork to get the ball rolling. That’s why I think these things could be better worked on in groups.

We’d all like to do a piece on the gift cerficate conspiracy, the top5 funniest fashion fads or a Jenna Jameson timeline complete with pictures and movies. The treshhold for tackling the project alone is huge and most of the time big enough for the “funniest porno titles” post to remain just another idea.

You can already find some material to use on your blog at the ideabank found on a supporting blog called The Favour Exchange. This other blog is trying to accomplish some of the same things as this one, only with not as tight co-operation. Blog owners can post requests on things they need help with and reward people with links.

Go ahead and check the ideabank out. Submit similar ideas and I’ll link you.

It’s been quiet for a while since I’m not huge on marketing. And without that it’s difficult to get these things rolling. There’s two things I’m going to do to showcase the blog and try and get people interested.

First, I’ll be giving out ideas. You can claim the ideas by e-mailing me or commenting on the blog. This will also get you linked. Also, since the idea is to get loads of quality content from different people, I’ll reward submissions with permanent links from some of my sites.

So, for now all submissions will be rewarded with an incoming links. Easily worth your while.

Taking websites from 0 visitors/month to 1000 visitors /month is a lot harder than taking them from 1000/m to 2000/m. And that translates to $$ in case you care about that.

This is one reason why it’s not wise to start your own blog just because you have something to say on the topic. Joining an existing project makes a lot more sense. The Hatchery is not just about creating succesful niche sites. We may do that too but the main idea is to form superior content to our members existing blogs.

It really does make sense.

Odds are you’re a blogger yourself. A blogger looking to get more readers to their blog. What you see here is an attempt to achieve that goal in a sustainable way. Instead of cooperating by link exchanges and traffic drives we try to use a community based approach to building content. Quality content is what gets incoming links and drives readers to your blog.

Right now blogging is the best way to get your ideas across. Still, offering your readers interesting content isn’t always easy. This is especially the case for specialized blogs on narrow topics.

Do you know of any newspapers or TV shows that are one man projects? Of course not. On the Internet it’s message boards that often produce the best material. Excellent stuff is born by exchange of ideas. We are all packed with knowledge and ideas on subjects we have no desire to blog about. Others may want to do just that and would welcome input from others before they publish their stuff.

Okie dokie, let me know if you’re interested. I’m not going to start pitching more ideas until I get some people to at least express their interest. Comment away.