My office is directly above a Borders book store. I recently went down to buy a book. As I walked out and looked at these identical prices side by side it hit me. For the first time in a long time, I had paid full price for a book.

This got me thinking about convenience, which seems to play a big role in pricing. Examples like the brick and mortar full price sales are pretty easy to come by–ever bought a beer at a professional sporting event? Convenience obviously goes beyond location. We hire accountants not only for their expertise, but to save us time. Ditto the landscaping company for those of us who have a lawn and don’t mow it ourselves.

Netflix makes a big deal about having no late fees. That’s one type of convenience, but I think many of their customers are equally jazzed by receiving DVDs in the mail. Then again, Hollywood and Blockbuster are still around because sometimes we don’t want to think ahead to what we’ll want to watch a couple days from now.

It’s strange that so much on the Internet is free given convenience is such a large selling point for online services. It’s safe to say that Wrigley Field charges as much as possible for refreshments. Why do so many on the Internet leave money on the table?

Three reasons why web developers are natural entrepreneurs:

1. Web developers and entrepreneurs focus on specific criteria and ignore impulses to do otherwise. Avoiding feature creep is marketing to your niche.
2. They both can think like a customer. “For what will someone pay me?” asks the marketer. “What did a visitor come here to do?” asks the web developer.
3. And both are able to think ahead to all possible outcomes… and plan for them. Programmers use logic to chase down bugs in software. Entrepreneurs are ready for “unforeseen circumstances.”

Got any more?

I’m pleased to be a guest blogger for Thom Singer today. My post is directed to small teams and solo entrepreneurs to embrace your smallness. While there is a certain power in thinking big, it can be a burden to pretend to be big.

Thom is a marketer who gets the value of personal relationships (in fact, he even wrote a book). If being a real human is so powerful, I think we tiny guys should be highlighting our smallness, rather than trying to hide it.

Read my post on Thom’s site.

While comments have been around for a long time on the web, they’re still under-utilized. There is no simple way for me to track comments that I leave at various sites. Currently, I may be able to receive notification via email of new comments or subscribe to comments via RSS. Email seems like overkill, but it might also be the simplest of these solutions. RSS is great, but I wouldn’t really want comments feeds clogging my already-full feed-reader.

There is also the option of revisiting web pages where I have left a comment, but I still have the problem of remembering which pages to visit. Perhaps a bookmark, or better yet a bookmarking tool would do the trick. Note that this is not an automated solution like the above. I would still have to visit these pages individually and note manually whether comments were added since my last visit.

In September, I was struck with what I thought was a wonderfully simple solution. Most sites upon which I would leave a comment currently have an RSS feed. If feed owners had unique identifiers for every subscriber, they could track which comments I want to follow. Then, those threads could be added to my already-existing, rolled-just-for-me feed.

I sat on this idea and it’s a good thing. Brad Feld has some excellent reasons not to do this. To summarize his thoughts, it basically comes down to personalized feeds becoming uncacheable by RSS readers.

Of course, caching isn’t a new problem for the web. Many old browsers, in an effort to help us dialup users of the internet’s past, showed cached versions of pages unless we took drastic measures. I used to empty my cache multiple times per day and now I don’t even remember the last time I had to do it. Still, there’s the issue of big providers like AOL caching at the server level.

But now caching is helpful with aggregating RSS feeds. As Brad mentions, if unique identifiers are used, the server load for both publisher and aggregator increase. I do wonder how much more traffic we’re talking. Feeds only contain the content, leaving the images and other design elements out (which helps with the download “weight”). Still, if aggregators are pinging hourly to see whether the feed it new, that could add up.

As Brad ends his post, so shall I. There’s got to be a better approach.

Ooo! I found one in my title. That should be “typos.”

From time to time, I’ll read a site and find a misspelling or typo. If it’s convenient (email address nearby, or they’re a friend of mine), I usually let the author know. As this has happened over the last year, I’m reminded of an idea that Matt Haughey had to let a trusted group edit his posts for errors. This seems like a widget that someone could add into extensible frameworks like Moveable Type and WordPress. A non-exhaustive search shows that nobody has worked this up yet.

Matt later expanded his idea to include letting anyone make edits. This seems like the natural progression and where typo-removal might be easiest. To avoid misuse, there would be a certain threshold, so that folks couldn’t make changes willy-nilly, rewriting entire posts. And there would have to be a way to revert changes… this is sounding more and more like a Wiki.

Like any software project, I can certainly see feature creep taking over this little widget. Anytime you give up even a tiny piece of control, it will probably be used differently than you imagined. For each nasty thing someone cooks up, there’s a piece of duct tape to make sure it never happens again. But how long can that dance go on? As I’m thinking through problems and their solutions, it’s moved from a simple little widget to a more involved solution to what wasn’t even that big of a pain in the first place.

The issues that arise out of this typo corrector are the same ones facing the many Wiki programmers. In general, I believe in people to do good. And I believe in the simple solution. However, wiki-izing the entire web would probably not comfort most people.

I’d love to come to some sort of conclusion, but I’m not sure there is one yet. Any ideas? If not, I suppose you can keep emailing me those “ttypos.”