Somewhat Smitten with AppSmitten
Every day, I get email asking me if I am interested in some affiliate program, link exchange, blah, blah, blah. Obviously, these people do not read my blog because I personally would question the wisdom of affiliating oneself with a person who has called a congressman a lying ass mother-fucker (I was right, too) and once used the likelihood of a colleague having a one-night stand with a man she met in a bar as a dependent variable.
The common suspicion that this blog is written with no adult supervision whatsoever is dangerously close to the truth. The rocket scientist, hardly counts as an adult. Before we went to The Spoiled One’s high school admission interview she commanded,
“Dad is not allowed to wear anything that has a cartoon character on it, has holes in it or is tie-dyed.”
This led the wise oldest daughter to conjecture (correctly),
“So, you’re going shopping, right?”
I am not sure why parents of prospective high school students are interviewed, because I imagine that the answer really of interest is to the question, “Can you afford the tuition?”
Which is the kind of thing you could answer on twitter, without the need of new clothes. But I digress. Actually, this entire blog is a digression so I suppose this is digression squared.
I was talking about the reason I ignore all of these affiliate / sponsorship/ linkbait requests. These are all tacky, irrelevant and/or useless. I started this blog because I often forget whatever it was I was thinking about on a given day, like back in 1985 when I finally figured out the difference between part and partial correlation – so, I thought I would write it down.
I have negative interest in most of the products I get queries from. Not only am I not interested in their product but its mere existence causes me to be less interested in life. There will never come a time when I write a review of a romance novel because that would require me to read one and I can feel brain cells dying at the mere thought. Occasionally, there are products that I am interested in – generally any kind of software – but following up is not a priority. I have software for coding (TextWrangler on the Mac, Notepad++ on Windows) for data analysis (SAS, JMP, SPSS and occasionally Stata) for all that office stuff (Microsoft Office and OpenOffice). I am BUSY. While something else may exist that is better what I already have is working and I have a client on Line 1 and Line 2.
Unlike all of these other invitations- appsmitten actually does something I could use and don’t already have. Click here to register for your very own appsmitten newsletter for free.
Here’s why you might want to sign up.
It goes through the 1,000,000 plus apps out there and gives reviews and recommendations. Sign up for their newsletter. Not only because they said they’d pay me if you did. I signed up for it and so far have downloaded two apps they recommended, NPR News and Dropbox. They recommended Pinterest which is supposedly the new application / social network everyone must have who has lady parts. It didn’t look like something I needed – I already have Delicious to bookmark websites and Evernote for everything else.
Three things I got from their newsletter and site. One was referrals to apps I thought I’d like, which I downloaded. A second was referrals to apps I use, like Evernote, that it doesn’t hurt to be reminded to use more frequently. The third was information on apps like Pinterest which I might (theoretically) want but decide against, for a variety of reasons – in this case lots of reviews on the app store that said it crashed their iPad.
So far, I’m loving Dropbox, especially since I am travelling for the next two weeks. I’ll write later about some of the cool apps I found through appsmitten.
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