Adsense can undermine your message

I put Adsense on this blog a couple of months ago to better understand how online advertising and monetization of content works. It's still a bit of a mystery to me if/why people click on advertisements so I thought perhaps I could learn by minor experimentation. The downside of using these ads are it sullies the purity of your site while simultaneously not making you very much money (based on the traffic of Silicon MBA anyways).

One weird thing I've noticed so far is that adsense can seriously undermine the message of your post. Yesterday, I wrote about critizing FreeCreditReport.com for engaging in a predatory business model. Today, I open up the post and my site is full of advertisements for FreeCreditReport.com and other online credit led generation services! My message about criticizing it's business model is a little undermined, don't you think?

I imagine this happens a lot. If you write a negative review about some company or practice and then ads endorsing that company or practice start showing up. I wonder how many vegans write blogs financed by ads from Omaha steaks?

Perhaps as Google Adsense gets smarter and understands the semantic meaning of the text, this sort of mistargeting won't take place.

How Acai Berries could save the New York Times

I was struck by two articles I read today about Acai Berries and what is says about why newspapers are failing in this digital age.

Via a link on Hacker News, I found an post on Black Hat SEO about a fellow that makes $15,000 a through Google adsense. The basic formula was 1) Pick a valuable industry 2) Create content in that industry 3) Take steps such at people find this content through Google 4) Profit when people click on valuable advertising.

The fellow gave an example of creating a site about Acai berries and how he makes $5 everytime someone clicks on a link on the site. After setting up the site, he basically has very little to do and makes some nice passive income. People who coming to his site have "purchase intent" for things regarding Acai Berries and therefore are valuable leads for advertisers.

That same day, the New York Times has an article about Acai Berries. It's a well researched, intelligent piece about Acai Berries. Because the New York Times is such a reputable source, many people will find this content through search engines when they are seeking Acai related products.

How does the New York Times monetize this valuable content? Through flippin ads about Ralph Lauren clothes! It's nuts, this is possibly the worst way to make money from this content. The people who are reading this content are interested in Acai Berries - serve them some ads about Acai Berries. Of course the New York Times has some Google Adsense advertisements on the page in the lower right hand corners where no one would have click.

It seems the little guys might understand internet advertising business models better than the big guys like newspapers. Newspapers need to understand:

1. Many people will find their content through search engines
2. Many people who see their articles will have purchase intent regarding that content
3. This is not ideal advertising space for "branded advertising"
4. This is ideal advertising space for products related to that purchase intent.

Newspapers - learn it and love it; these are the rules.

The FreeCreditReport.com Business Model & Ethics

The internet is full of scams and deceptive practices centered around "recurring billing solutions". While technically not fraud, how many businesses make their livelihood by convincing consumers they are getting something free (or a one-time fee) but in reality charging the unsuspecting consumer every single month for the service? The best recent example are all the "stimulus checks" websites out there today.

I call this the FreeCreditReport.com business model. Credit reports are actually available for free, but not through this company. Their entire business model is built around convincing someone to sign up and then making it very difficult for them to cancel. This business a pure wealth transfer between the unsuspecting and the predatory - it creates zero value for society.

The current push among Web 2.0 companies to move from a "ad-supported" to a "paid-subscription" business model. I hope that as people make this transition, the companies take care to avoid this predatory model. In the jobs space, I see companies are increasingly charging job seekers monthly fees to access "exclusive jobs". I hope that these services are providing real value and not just taking advantage of people's insecurities about finding work right now.

The world doesn't need another FreeCreditReport.com. I hope entreprenuers will remember that as they design their businesses. Moreover, I hope the ad network and websites (like Google, Yahoo, Facebook) will work hard to make sure that they deceptive business are not allow to advertise on their grounds.

Google Checkout raises prices

When we first started using Google checkout, it was free. Then they raised the price to 2.2% + $0.20.

Now Google is announcing a massive price increase. A tiered structure that penalizes the vast majority of merchants. See below.

---------------

Hello,

We're writing to let you know that on May 5, 2009, Google
Checkout's transaction processing fees will be changing. We'll be
transitioning from our 2.0% + $0.20 per transaction rate to a new
tiered fee structure, where the rates will vary depending on the
dollar amount of your monthly sales processed through Checkout.
The rate you'll be charged beginning on May 5, 2009 will be based
on your sales processed through Checkout during the month of April
2009. Each month thereafter, we'll continue to use the prior
month's sales volume to determine your transaction processing
rate. For more details about the new rates, please visit
http://checkout.google.com/seller/fees.html

We'll also be discontinuing the AdWords free transaction
processing promotion on May 5, 2009. Any AdWords transaction
processing credits accrued during April 2009 will be applied
towards transactions that occur on May 1-4, 2009.

Fees are the same for all payment types (Visa, MasterCard,
American Express, and Discover) and there are still no monthly,
setup, or gateway fees. For cross-border transactions, there will
be an additional 1% fee assessed per transaction. To learn more
about Google Checkout fees, please visit
http://checkout.google.com/seller/fees.html

Google is committed to the continued growth and development of
Checkout and to helping merchants increase sales by driving more
leads and higher conversions. Advertisers who use Checkout have
the opportunity to display the Checkout badge on their ads, which
has proven to be an effective way to differentiate ads and attract
user interest. Checkout users click on ads 10% more when the ad
displays the Checkout badge and convert 40% more than shoppers who
have not used Checkout in the past.

For more information about this change and how it affects the
product, please read our post on The Official Google Checkout
Blog: http://googlecheckout.blogspot.com/2009/03/google-checkout-fees-in-2009.html

If you have any questions, please visit our Help Center at
http://checkout.google.com/support/sell/bin/answer.py?answer=134473
Thank you for using Google Checkout.

Sincerely,
The Google Checkout Team

MBA rankings (that are actually right)

Whenever, I look through the business school and mba rankings produced by magazines, I'm struck that the rankings are stupid. It's as if they just randomly selected criteria, scored the schools along the criteria, and then said here are the rankings folks!

The problem with this approach is it is wrong. The two reasons it are wrong are 1) The criteria are arbitrary 2) The variance in the results (the fact that the rankings change ever year dramatically) is completely unexplained and probably wrong.

Since I've noticed a lot of the traffic to this blog is by people looking for information about MBA programs, I'm going to give you my opinion about business school rankings.

I think better approach rankings schools would be to ask the question - what schools do people want to attend? Using a statistical method called "conjoint analysis" you can look at what schools did people get in to, and based on that choice set, where did they choose to attend. If someone chooses Stanford over Wharton, you can rank Stanford over Wharton. If someone chooses Wharton over Tuck, you can rank Stanford and Wharton over Tuck. With a large enough data set, the preferences are fairly stable.

As my data set, I'm going to use my "vague memory" of what business schools my peers decided to attend based when I was at Mercer Management Consulting (now Oliver Wyman). I'm also not actually going to perform the analysis (that is beyond the limits of me and this actual faux data), but instead guesstimate the results based on observed behavior. I hope another institution (maybe someone like McKinsey that would have large data set) would perform this actual analysis some day. This is of course biased by the time at Stanford GSB and all my other biases since this guesstimate is essentially a qualitative assessment.

MBA rankings by Silicon MBA

1. Stanford
1. Harvard
3. Wharton
4. Kellogg
5. Tuck
5. MIT
5. Chicago
8. Columba
8. Berkeley
10. NYU

There you go. You'll notice they mostly fall in bands/tiers. Again, this result is heavily based on my own opinion, but my opinion is informed by observations of what business schools prospective applicants actually choose to attend.

Facebook takes on Twitter!

Facebook's announcement to allow 1-way following of friends amounts to a direct assault on Twitter.

If you haven't heard, Facebook members can now have as many friends/followers as they like. Moreover, the can allow people who they don't know to follow them without having to reciprocate.

What has made Twitter popular is it gives anyone the ability to broadcast to the world. Facebook is now opening up this feature to its 175 million active users. Will users start using Facebook as a broadcasting platform? The companies has a few advantages over Twitter:

1. 175 million users is huge head start
2. With Facebook you can broadcast more rich and interesting information since you're not constrained by 140 characters.

Hitherto, Facebook has just been used to connect people who know each other in the real world. Will it take off as a broadcasting platform? Only time will tell.

SEO for Job Sites - a Race to the Bottom?

Google is the starting point for most people's navigation of the internet. For hr, recruiting, and job sites, this is no different. As a result, job sites focus intently on SEO (search engine optimization). SEO broadly refers to making the content on your site accessible to search engines (ie The Google!).

People Google the term "jobs" about 150,000,000 times a month. Because of this, almost all job sites want their pages to show up for common (and long tail) search terms. The result is that job search sites are all following the same best practices and focusing more on the question "will Google find this content?" than on "is this good content?"

Try searching for any job-related search term on Google. Try the term "miami jobs". Look at the first 10 sites; they are all following the same employment SEO formula, have similar page titles and meta data, and show the same jobs. Not one of the results gives you a website that is generally that useful or unique for someone conducting a Miami specific job search. This pattern continues for almost any job-related search, no matter how obscure.

I don't want to call the results spam, but they are just not interesting. Many sites out there have great content, but it seems the industry is focused more on gaming the Google SEO guidelines and less on producing interesting content. The result is that most sites are pretty much repackaging the same ole crap, competing against each other in a race to the top of Google, but to the bottom of the job seeker experience. More and more, all the job search sites out there are just starting to look the same.

Google, to its credit, recognizes that when sites create content for the sole purpose of search engine optimization, the quality of search results goes down. I wonder how Google will adjust it's algorithm to ensure fresh interesting results for career sites. It certainly will create a ripple in the industry.

13 point checklist for startups

Paul Graham at Ycombinator recently published a great essay entitled Startups in 13 Sentences. The essay stands out for its elegant simplicity - clearly a lot of experience and data are neatly reduced to these thirteen tips about starting a company. Like all aphorisms, the tips don't apply to all companies and all situations, but they are surprisingly robust in my opionion.

The tips are great advice for someone thinking about starting a startup. I think it's quite useful as a diagnostic tool for all startup founders as well. Go through each of the 13 points and rate yourself on a A-F scale. Based on the the results, what would you do differently? What are you you doing well and where can you improve?

I went through the excercise for Personforce and found it illuminating. I'll spare you the results, but it definitely highlighted areas where we can improve.

Here's an abbreviated version of Paul's startup tips that you can use are a scoring sheet:

1. Pick good cofounders: ___

2. Launch fast: ___

3. Let your idea evolve: ___

4. Understand your users: ___

5. Better to make a few users love you than a lot ambivalent: ___

6. Offer surprisingly good customer service: ___

7. You make what you measure: ___

8. Spend little: ___

9. Get ramen profitable: ___

10. Avoid distractions: ___

11. Don't get demoralized: ___

12. Don't give up: ___

13. Deals fall through: ___

Definitely read the full version with Paul's explanations here before taking the test.

Email fax by RingCentral is amazing

When we started Personforce, I was amazed at how much faxing went on in the industry. Before this experience, I had used a fax machine maybe once or twice in my entire life. After we launched though, I was paying usurious rates to the Stanford GSB practically every day to send and receive faxes to and from clients.

When I graduated from school and started Personforce fulltime, one of our first purchases was our own fax machine. For a while I was pretty happy about it. Whenever the fax machine starting ringing my ears perked up - it was generally the sound of a new order coming in, which was very exciting. Actually, lots of times it was spam telemarketers which was quite disappointing.

When we changed offices we had to change telephone lines so I revisited our fax service. We decided to try out an email fax service (efax) because it just seemed like the modern thing to do. RingCentral seemed reasonably priced and full featured so we choose them.

It turned out switching to RingCentral has been an incredible experience. The software is well designed and easy to use. You can very easily replicate all the core features of sending and receiving faxes.

The best part of RingCentral is that it puts your fax "in the clouds". That means I can access it from my laptop, anyone else's computer, from my phone, or from any device that can connect to the internet. Now when I get a fax I can check it out on my iPhone whereever I am. I'd contrast this to having to physically go to the Stanford GSB fax terminal after class and see if anything came in.

The other great benefit of email fax services is that they cut down on paperwork. All your documents come to you digitized so there is no need to phyically file documents. I almost never need to file paper documents anymore now.

Anyhow, I highly recommend putting your fax in the cloud. I don't know much about other services but we're quite happy with RingCentral. I particularly like the nice "ding" sound when a new order comes in.

Getting your MBA online? I'm skeptical.

As part of a side project, I recently tried researching online MBA programs.

First off, I learned it's really hard to research almost anything in the online education space because of the vibrant lead generation business. Basically, there are a lot of companies that are willing to pay a lot of money for customer leads of prospective students. As a result, there are lots of spammy sites about online MBA programs that just try to get you to click on their advertisements.

As a rule, if a company is will to pay a lot of money for a customer lead, they are generally taking advantage of their customers. That got me thinking, is getting your MBA online worth it?

First of the pro's. An online education is accessible to lots of people because it's flexible around your schedule and personal life. Also, you can avoid the time-consuming application process for a traditional program. Some employers will increase your pay scale if you can check a box saying you have an MBA, so it seems worth it if you work at one of those places. Finally, I assume these programs actually teach you something about accounting, finance, operations, and strategy, and learning is generally good.

However, I think the bad certainly outweighs the good. First off, you're deprived of most of the benefits of the MBA - the network of alumni and the signaling effect associated with your school's brand. Second, a lot of the learning in an MBA program (specifically in areas like Strategy) is experiential; I'm skeptical that can be recreated online. Finally, these programs charge you an arm and a leg; it seems like highway robbery for a product which has very low variable costs.

What I would suggest is that instead of getting an MBA online, you should get an accounting degree online. I think most of the concrete book knowledge in the MBA program can be captured through accounting and finance. Moreover, accounting is the sort of thing that you can probably learn online well and that a deep knowledge of makes you immediately marketable. Just my two cents!

Reflections on Entrepreneurship from Stanford GSB

Going through an old notebook of mine, I found a page of things I had learned about startups and entrepreneurship from my time in the MBA program at Stanford GSB. I wrote it on 6/12/07, about a week before i graduated. I culled these from things I learned from various classes, lectures, meetings, books, and during the early days of starting Personforce.

• Entrepreneurship is about building something with little to zero resources
• Do rather than analyze. Err on the side of speed than precision
• Building a company is an iterative process. Test and learn.
• There is a mental inflection point when the startup moves from idea to actual business
• The micro-details of the product, the sales pitch, the contract matter.
• There is a way to solve any problem. There is a way to sell anything. It might just be harder than you are prepared to work.
• Differentiated businesses require lots of hard work
• Do the dogs want to eat the dog food?
• Your sheer force of will is a competitive advantage
• Work with people who have different skills but similar values to you
• You have to give equity away to make the pie larger
• You have to strike and scale while the iron is hot
• Successful entrepreneurs are just normal people
• You need to commit to something to succeed. Good things start happening and it provides focus. "Throw your cap over the fence"
• Little is gained by secrecy, good things happen when talking to smart people
• Act weak when you are strong. Act still when you are about to move.
• Little companies can crush competitors
• Achieving public success has an irrevocable price
• Don't add costs to the business
• To succeed, you need to be contrarian and right
• Selling into existing markets can be easier to sell to. Creating new markets can be powerful.
• Great businesses create an impact far in excess of the capital invested in them.
• Every early decision has strategic and ethical implications
• Before every fork in the road, ask your self exactly what it is that you are trying to accomplish
  

Perhaps at a later date I'll write about which of these points I found to be true, especially true, or not sure true in starting a business.

LinkedIn is Not a Social Network

LinkedIn is a fantastically useful service, but I'm not sure I'd call it a social network. LinkedIn's rich database of contact information is a highly valuable business tool, but the company's value as social network is limited.

In a social network, you get utility from fact that your friends are on it. On Facebook, I can see the pictures my friends upload, get invited to events, and generally keep in touch with my network. If I were on Facebook with a random set of people I didn't know, I'm certain the service would be of little value to me.

On the other hand, I get almost no utility from having "friends on Linkedin". Sure, it's a nice way to store the contact information of professional contacts, but I can do so in Outlook, through Plaxo, in an excel spreadsheet, or on my phone; each of these options is only marginally less useful than LinkedIn at saving people's contact information. LinkedIn has some value as a social network, but it pails in comparison to its value as business tool to find contacts.

LinkedIn's primary value is as a giant database of contact information. It allows you to get in touch with the right person, at the right company, at the right time. It's hard to emphasis how valuable this is (or will can be) for facilitating sales, hiring, and business development. If you are a paper salesman in Scranton, you can look up the contact information of who is the purchasing manager at the local law firm, send them a message, and then hopefully connect. If you are a recruiter, you can find people near you that have the skills that your client is looking for. Before LinkedIn, you were reliant on your own network of contacts or cold calling into the main company line and working your way through a phone tree blindly.

I'd say that 99% of the value of LinkedIn is that people on it are NOT my friends. In fact, the fact that I can only freely see the contact information of my friends is a clever "freemium" strategy by the company -- I have to pay up if I want to view the information of people who are not my friends.

By calling its self a social network, LinkedIn got its users to sign up, invite their friends, and populate the database. Calling its self a social network has been a great marketing technique to get users to build a data asset. In fact, companies that have marketed themselves as large databases of contacts (Plaxo, Jigsaw) have been far less successful than LinkedIn.

I think LinkedIn knows that its primary value is as a business tool to connect people who don't know each other but who should do business with each other. The company is still in the preliminary stages of developing this tool, but it one of the most valuable data assets in the world today.

Business School Acceptance Rates Will Be Brutal

When I got my MBA at Stanford GSB, I think the acceptance rate was around 12%. We all felt like we got in by the skin of our teeth.

In 2008, the acceptance rate at Stanford GSB was 8%. At Harvard Business School (HBS) it was 14%, and at Wharton it was 17%. Yikes.

For everything I'm hearing, this year is looking brutal. Round one results came in a few weeks ago and it looks nasty. I've heard of a lot of people that got rejected or wait listed at Stanford GSB that I think ordinarily would have gotten in; you know the type - saved babies while working at a top tier private equity firm, ran a hedge fund out of their ivy league college dorm, etc.

I guess it's not suprising that acceptance rates are low -- everyone is trying to wait out the recession from the sidelines at school. Not only that, but private equity firms, hedge funds, banks, and consulting firms have fewer job openings, releasing a flood of candidates into the market.

If I had to guess, in 2009 the MBA acceptance rates will be brutal. Here's my guess: Stanford GSB 6%, HBS 11%, Wharton 14%. Best of luck to everybody applying this year.

Text Links Ads + College Newspapers = BAD

Through my capacity at Personforce, I've gotten to know the college newspaper industry reasonably well. It's a delight to work with the students and faculty at these fantastic training grounds for journalism and media management. I can't say enough good things about the caliber of the people at these institutions and the journalism they produce.

Working with college newspapers , I'm struck that perhaps a pernicious force has infiltrated these otherwise sterling institutions - inadvertent influence-selling through text link ads.

In today's media landscape, it's very important to understand Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and make sure you abide by ethical online practices so that Google will find you. Google is the starting place for where most people find content. Jeff Atwood discusses that after launching his startup StackOverflow, he now gets 83% of his traffic (over 3 millions visitors!) from Google. So in today's media landscape, it's important to play by the rules or you'll get black listed and shut out of most of your traffic.

Almost all search engines use links as a currency to measure a website's authority. If you get lots of good inbound links from high profile websites to your website, Google rewards this by giving your site a high Page Rank. A high Page Rank means that people are more likely to find your content through Google. The more people can find your content, the more traffic, the more revenue for your newspaper.

One thing that struck me though is that most college newspapers have very low page ranks in Google. Even more startling - their page rank keeps falling. This was extremely surprising to me for a variety of reasons. First, all of these institutions publish first rate, original, sophisticated content. Yet somehow they have page rank of 4, the same as a mid-level blogger. Second, almost every college newspaper has been publishing online for over 10 years, but from Google's perspective they look like a brand new publication of questionable authenticity. Heck some of these newspapers have been around for over 200 years!

So why is this going on? Digging around the answer is clear - text link advertising. For some bizarre reason many college newspaper have insidious text link ads all over their websites. Text links ads are when an advertiser pays to have a link on your site so they can get some of your "google authority" and look like they have authority because your newspaper is linking to them. In essence, the advertiser wants the newspaper to link to them so their company shows up higher in search results and they willing to pay for it.

Virtually no reputable newspaper, blog, or publisher accepts text link advertising today for a big reason - when you sell a text link you are selling your influence. It is the technical and ethical equivalent of publishing a favorable article about a company in your newspaper because they paid you to do so. Ethical issues aside, Google thinks less of newspapers that do this and punishes them tremendously.

Matt Cutts, a Google search engineer and evangelist for the company writes:

Google (and pretty much every other major search engine) uses hyperlinks to help determine reputation. Links are usually editorial votes given by choice, and link-based analysis has greatly improved the quality of web search. Selling links muddies the quality of link-based reputation and makes it harder for many search engines (not just Google) to return relevant results.

Remarkably, Matt Cutts specifically calls out college newspapers for selling text link ads:

When the Berkeley college newspaper has six online gambling links (three casinos, two for poker, and one bingo) on its front page, it’s harder for search engines to know which links can be trusted.

When text links ads are sold without using the "no follow" attribute, Google knows you are doing this and penalizes the newspaper as a less reputable source:

If you want to buy or sell a link purely for visitors or traffic and not for search engines, a simple method exists to do so (the nofollow attribute). Google’s stance on selling links is pretty clear and we’re pretty accurate at spotting them, both algorithmically and manually. Sites that sell links can lose their trust in search engines.

So if any college newspaper is wondering why it has a 4 or a 5 page rank instead of a 6 or a 7, this is probably the answer. Most likely some company is taking advantage of students who think text link advertisements are a conventional form of advertising. In reality they are the purest form of payola and taint a site's reputation. The New York Times, Washington Post, or any newspaper wouldn't touch them with a 10-foot pole.

Given the prevalence of all these text link ads for college newspapers, my next question is where are they coming from? Who is taking advantage of the students at these colleges?

An experiment in audience building

As an experiment in audience building, I started a blog call The Police Jobs Review. I'm trying to see if I blog regularly about a fairly narrow subject, what exactly happens. A few things to note:

1. I don't know much about Police employment and issues
2. I'm trying to write most days
3. I try to scan the current events about police and work and see if i can comment on it
4. I don't plan on marketing the blog, participating in social media interactions or anything

It's a pure experiment. Let's hope I can blog enough to keep it going!

FanBridge, stop spamming the crap out of me

Every day I get about 3 or 4 pieces of spam from FanBridge, the email delivery service for bands.

Normally email delivery services like Constant Contact, iContact etc make sure that you opt in to the list before they deliver email from their customers to you. They provide the valuable service of mail deliverability by ensuring that users want to receive these emails.

FanBridge claims on on it's website that users must opt in to receive messages, but this is a bold faced lie. So FanBridge, how about it? Will you stop spamming the crap out of everybody?

Tax cuts and police employment

Covering how tax cuts for business affect police employment over at the police jobs review. Obviously, we don't solve anything, but its an interesting example of the prisoner's dilemma.

College Rankings for Law, Politics & Government

Personforce produced a new way to look at College Rankings. Basically it creates way to measure what schools are ranked best for a career in politics or law.

Hope it produces some interesting insight! Republished below with permission.
-------------------------------

At Personforce we help connect employers with students at the top universities in the country through our network of college job boards. In that capacity, we're interested in the question - what are the top universities and how do you rank them?

Rather than measuring an arbitrary set of metrics, why not look at what schools best prepare their students for the careers they want to pursue? This post examines the question: if you are interested in politics and law, what schools produce alumni that seem to excel in that area.

As a proxy for success in the field of politics and law, we use acceptance to Yale Law School. We are using this because Yale Law seems to produce a disproportionate number of Presidents, Supreme Court Justices, legislators, and partners at white shoe firms and is very difficult to get in to. Oh, and most importantly, Yale publishes a list of what undergraduate institutions each of its graduates attended.

First, here is a dump of the number of students each undergraduate school has contributed to the current Yale Law student body:

Yale University - 82 students

Harvard University - 66

Stanford University - 33

Columbia University - 30

Princeton University - 24

Brown University - 17

Dartmouth College - 15

University of California at Berkeley - 15

Duke University - 11

University of Michigan at Ann Arbor - 11

University of Pennsylvania - 11

Williams College - 11

Amherst University - 9

Northwestern University - 9

University of Notre Dame [Indiana] - 9

Cornell University - 8

University of California at Los Angeles - 8

University of Chicago - 8

University of Virginia - 8

Georgetown University - 7

Swarthmore College - 7

University of Texas at Austin - 7

Wesleyan University - 7

Brigham Young University - 6

Massachusetts Institute of Technology - 5

New York University - 5

University of Toronto [Canada] - 5

Washington University [Missouri] - 5

Wellesley College - 5

Emory University - 4

Howard University - 4

Johns Hopkins University - 4

Middlebury College - 4

University of Georgia - 4

Arizona State University - 3

Boston College - 3

Fordham University - 3

National Taiwan University [Taiwan] - 3

Oberlin College - 3

United States Naval Academy - 3

University of Maryland - 3

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill - 3

University of Southern California - 3

University of Washington - 3

University of Wisconsin at Madison - 3

American University - 3

Bard College - 2

Columbia University [Barnard College] - 2

Hebrew University of Jerusalem [Israel] - 2

McGill University [Canada] - 2

Morehouse College - 2

Ohio State University - 2

Peking University [People’s Republic of China] - 2

Rice University - 2

Université Panthéon-Assas Paris II [France] - 2

University of California at San Diego - 2

University of Delaware - 2

University of Iowa - 2

University of Mary Washington - 2

University of Missouri - 2

University of South Carolina - 2

University of the South - 2

Univerzitet U Pritini [Yugoslavia] - 2

Vanderbilt University - 2

Wake Forest University - 2

Washington and Lee University - 2

Whitman College - 2

Albertson College of Idaho - 1

Alma College - 1

American University in Bulgaria [Bulgaria] - 1

Aristoteleio Panepistimio Thessalonikis [Greece] - 1

Austin College - 1

Bar-Ilan University [Israel] - 1

Bates College - 1

Baylor University - 1

Benedictine College - 1

Biola University - 1

Bowdoin College - 1

Brandeis University - 1

Bryn Mawr College - 1

California State University - 1

Calvin College - 1

Chulalongkorn University [Thailand] - 1

Claremont McKenna College - 1

Colgate University - 1

College of William and Mary - 1

Concordia University [Canada] - 1

Denison University - 1

Depauw University - 1

East China University of Politics and Law [People’s Republic of China] - 1

Eberhard-Karls-Universität Tübingen [Germany] - 1

Ewha Woman’s University [Republic of Korea] - 1

Fairfield University - 1

Gettysburg College - 1

Gonzaga University - 1

Gordon College - 1

Grinnell College - 1

Hamilton College - 1

Hampton University - 1

Harding University - 1

Haverford College - 1

Indiana University - 1

Ithaca College - 1

Kansai University [Japan] - 1

Lahore University of Management Sciences [Pakistan] - 1

Lewis and Clark College - 1

Louisiana State University - 1

Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München [Germany] - 1

Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg [Germany] - 1

Masarykova Universita V Brnó [Czech Republic] - 1

Minnesota State University - 1

Mount Holyoke College - 1

National Law School of India University [India] - 1

National University of Singapore [Singapore] - 1

North Carolina State University - 1

Ohio Wesleyan University - 1

Pennsylvania State University - 1

Pomona College - 1

Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile [Chile] - 1

Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo [Brazil] - 1

Rutgers, State University of New Jersey - 1

Saint Olaf College - 1

Santa Clara University - 1

Sarah Lawrence College - 1

Sookmyung Women’s University [Republic of Korea] - 1

State University of New York at Buffalo - 1

State University of New York at Stony Brook - 1

Sveuilite U Zagrebu [Croatia] - 1

Tel Aviv University [Israel] - 1

Texas A & M University - 1

Thammasat University [Thailand] - 1

Touro College - 1

Tsinghua University [People’s Republic of China] - 1

Tufts University - 1

Tulane University - 1

Universidad de Buenos Aires [Argentina] - 1

Universidad de Mendoza Law School [Argentina] - 1

Universidad de Palermo [Argentina] - 1

Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro [Brazil] - 1

Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul [Brazil] - 1

Università degli Studi di Sassari [Italy] - 1

Università degli Studi, Pisa [Italy] - 1

Universität Zürich [Switzerland] - 1

University of Alberta [Canada] - 1

University of Arizona - 1

University of Auckland [New Zealand] - 1

University of California at Irvine - 1

University of California at Santa Barbara - 1

University of California, Santa Cruz - 1

University of Central Arkansas - 1

University of Colorado - 1

University of Denver - 1

University of Florida - 1

University of Haifa [Israel] - 1

University of Illinois - 1

University of Massachusetts - 1

University of Minnesota - 1

University of North Carolina at Asheville - 1

University of North Texas - 1

University of Northumbria at Newcastle [United Kingdom] - 1

University of Oklahoma - 1

University of Oxford [United Kingdom] - 1

University of Pittsburgh - 1

University of Pugent Sound - 1

University of Saint Andrews [United Kingdom] - 1

University of Texas at Dallas - 1

University of Western Australia [Australia] - 1

Vassar College - 1

Wuhan University [People’s Republic of China] - 1

Yeshiva University - 1

It's a interesting list. As you would expect, schools like Harvard, Yale, and Stanford top the list. However, schools like Michigan out-perform schools like Amherst, mostly likely because they are about a gazillion times bigger.

So, as a final step we need to control for the size of the undergraduate institutions. Pulling the undergraduate data from Freebase and Wikipedia and dividing through, we create a ranking of undergraduate schools where students have the best chance of attending Yale Law School. We index these results to 100 (since the % on their own are meaningless) to present:

College Rankings for a Career in Law or Politics

1. Yale University - 100

2. Harvard University - 64

3. Columbia University - 49

4. Williams College - 36

5. Amherst University - 35

6. Stanford University - 32

7. Princeton University - 32

8. Swarthmore College - 30

9. Dartmouth College - 23

10. Brown University - 19

11. Wesleyan University - 16

12. Wellesley College - 14

13. Duke University - 12

14. Middlebury College - 11

15. University of Chicago - 10

16. University of the South - 9

17. Whitman College - 9

18. Massachusetts Institute of Technology - 8

19. Washington and Lee University - 7

20. Bard College - 7

21. Northwestern University - 7

22. University of Pennsylvania - 7

23. University of Notre Dame [Indiana] - 7

24. Oberlin College - 7

25. Georgetown University - 7

26. Johns Hopkins University - 6

27. Columbia University [Barnard College] - 6

28. Washington University [Missouri] - 5

29. Morehouse College - 4

30. United States Naval Academy - 4

31. Rice University - 4

32. University of California at Berkeley - 4

33. Emory University - 4

34. Cornell University - 4

35. University of Virginia - 4

36. Howard University - 4

37. American University - 3

38. University of Mary Washington - 3

39. Wake Forest University - 3

40. University of Michigan at Ann Arbor - 3

41. Fordham University - 2

42. Boston College - 2

43. University of California at Los Angeles - 2

44. Vanderbilt University - 2

45. New York University - 2

46. Brigham Young University - 1

47. University of Texas at Austin - 1

48. University of Southern California - 1

49. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill - 1

50. National Taiwan University [Taiwan] - 1

51. Hebrew University of Jerusalem [Israel] - 1

52. University of Georgia - 1

53. University of Toronto [Canada] - 1

54. Peking University [People’s Republic of China] - 1

55. University of Delaware - 1

56. University of Maryland - 1

57. University of South Carolina - 1

58. University of Wisconsin at Madison - 1

59. University of Washington - 1

60. University of Iowa - 1

61. University of California at San Diego - 1

62. University of Missouri - 1

63. McGill University [Canada] - 1

64. Arizona State University - 0

65. Ohio State University - 0

And so Yale University comes out first in our rankings of schools that prepare you for a career in law and politics. A few observations based on the data:

1. Attending a top 10 (or in particular a top 2) school in the ranking gives a huge advantage in terms of likelihood to get into Yale Law.

2. Yale Law seems to gives a disproportionate number of spots to its own undergrads. A student at Yale is 66% more likely to get into Yale Law than a student at Harvard?

3. Schools like Williams, Amherst, Swarthmore do really well in this ranking! If you are interested in law and politics, it looks like they rank ahead of schools like MIT, Stanford, Brown, Dartmouth, Penn, Northwestern. It makes me wonder if US News is doing a disservice to liberal arts schools by ranking them separately from universities.

Anyhow, there is no need to put too much stock in the results. It was an interesting and quick exercise based on some assumptions (reasonable ones hopefully) that produced a dramatically different ranking than other methods. It would be fascinating to produce similar analyses for the business and medical professions. Thanks for reading and if you are looking for a job, you can of course find jobs in law and policy on Personforce.

Job search in a recession

Over at Personforce we just posted a guide to getting a job in bad economy. I'd encourage you to check it out our post about finding a job in a bad economy.

Also, we've enhanced our job search on Personforce. Please check it out:

Search jobs on Personforce

iPhone for Small Business

Over at the Personforce blog, i wrote a review on how well the iPhone worked for small business and startups. Check it out here: iPhone for Small Business. Reprinted below with permission.
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At Personforce a lot of us are using the new Apple iPhone 3G for work and for fun. We thought it might be useful to give a short review on using the iPhone if you are a small business. After all, in a small company or startup your phone is your lifeline and you don't have a lot of resources, staff, or time to waste fiddling around with a new device.

Overall, we think the iPhone is awesome for small business. There certainly are huge negatives, but the pros really stand out. Most notably:

1. Your computer in your pocket. Unlike any prior PDA, the iPhone gives you true mobility by giving you remote access to all the functions of a computer. Because of the fully functioning web browser (combined with Google Apps) you can view any document, look up anything on the web, log in to your company's accounting systems, and of course make make a phone call from anywhere. You can basically set up your office environment so that there is nothing you can't do when you're on the road. This is a great leap forward in productivity!

2. Web Browsing. You can look up anything anywhere anytime. On the whole internet. Enough said.

3. IMAP & POP3 connections. While a Push email service for the SMB space would be a welcome addition, the iphone's IMAP connection is actually pretty good. As a result you can very confidently use your google apps email account from the iPhone. On the otherhand, the Samsung Blackjack routinely failed to work with google apps and was a constant source of frustration.

4. Apps make commuting better. You can listen to Pandora radio on the bus, play some iPhone games on a plane, and surf the web while you're in line at Starbucks. My favorite app so far is built by Muse. It won't be publicly available for a couple of weeks but we managed a sneak peek and wow! We'd have to say the one downside of apps in general is you can't do anything else while using them, so surfing the web or checking your email is out of the question.

So, the iphone is great, but there are some huge cons that a small business should consider:

1. Calendaring. Seriously, the calendar solution is not good for the iPhone. Your appoints are buried several clicks away and you have to actively be checking to see what's on your plate for the day. We really need a solution that somehow shows you the upcoming (or at least number of) appointments you have that day on your home screen. Moreover, there is no good way (on a PC at least) to sync you Google apps calendar with your iPhone.

2. Checking your email on the sly. Say you're in the middle of a dinner party or driving down 280, and you just need to take a quick peek to see if you have an email (don't email while driving!); it's really hard to check for a message quickly. You have to pull out the phone, unlock it, open your email (and maybe wait for it to load). The phone is so slippery eventually you'll drop it while doing this some time. I'd compare with with traditional devices where you just pull out the phone and take a peek.

3. Battery life. If you mess around with the phone and use its features throughout the day, the battery will die around dinnertime. This could lead to an absolutely cataclysmic event - no phone or email access. Yikes.

So, that's our perspective on the using the iPhone if you're a small business. Overall, we think it's a huge leap forward for making small business more productive from the road. Not only that, but it's very fun and enjoyable to use.