David Chan’s Blog

Although there are increasingly more and more things fighting for a slice of my time, I always find time to read a bit every day. The material I have been reading in the past included a lot of coding language references and insights into best practices and methodologies, and I still enjoy leafing through Joel on Software or the Pragmatic Programmer every once in a while.

However, over the last two years I have been immersing myself into books about marketing and startups. My work deals solely with the internet, and I figure that trendiness and quick beginnings make for success in this field. Guy Kawasaki and Seth Godin have earned a spot in my “Non-trivial Blogs” tab in iGoogle (which includes 37signals and Joel, and also Kathy Sierra before March of this year). I am looking to continue increasing the size of my bookshelf, and will be looking to read Love Is the Killer App in the very near future.

Looks like I’ll have plenty of things to keep me busy during the unpleasant autumn (read: cold and wet) in Vancouver.

Late last week, there was an unveiling of good and bad news for prospective first-time home buyers in Vancouver.

The bad news is that property tax for Vancouver homes increased by eight percent, which is the greatest tax increase in the last decade. The Non-Partisan Association made this decision to help balance the difference in property tax rates between business and home properties.

The good news is that a federal law has reduced the down-payment needed to not require mortgage insurance. Only 20% of the purchase price is needed instead of the previous amount of 25%, which will make it easier for buyers to avoid buying the mortgage insurance.

These recent variables add to the already difficult decision of where, when and what of home buying, not to mention all the speculation surrounding the housing market price bubble. It will be interesting to see what effect these two changes will have on buying trends in this city.

Over the recent years, the popularity of blogging and weblogs has increased tremendously and shows no signs of slowing down. With as many as 1.3 million posts made per day, weblogs are right up at the top with other mainstream media outlets such as television and print. And of course, mainstream media has the power to influence its audience to make certain decisions as consumers (which sometimes leads to bribery).

So what are some popular brands mentioned in blog articles? Cameron Olthuis has compiled a list of the 10 most popular brands on Digg, a prominent weblog aggregator, in the last year. In the article, he made a simple yet insightful brand versus brand comparison:

Wii - 1503
Xbox - 781
PS3 - 787

iPod - 690
Zune - 154

Apple - 1731
Microsoft - 1502

Google - 1484
Yahoo - 1105
Microsoft - 1502

I decided to see how the above companies did over the course of the last 12 months, and to see if a brand’s popularity in the blogosphere agrees with its success.

The below data is collected from Google Finance, for the period of March 2006 to March 2007, and it outlines the growth of the company’s share price.

Wii (Nintendo): +48.29%
Xbox (Microsoft): -0.29%
PS3 (Sony): +5.8%

Apple: +29.76%
Microsoft: -0.29%

Google: +22.13%
Yahoo!: -5.06%
Microsoft: -0.29%

There are a lot more factors affecting the growth of a brand/company than just media attention, but there is no doubt that many brands and products would like to ride the wave and get on the blog bandwagon.