Category: Thought

July 8, 2003

  • Thought

    Blogstop:

    “Form a sentence from the acronym of the last word found on the latest post. Quirky, funny, nasty, silly, serious, whatever your post may be, the words are yours. Every correct entry gives you 1 point.”

  • Thought

    “The Economist’s “The Fortune of the Commons” article gives an overview of the advantages of standards in layman’s terms:

    “Not every technology sector had such far-sighted leaders. But railways, electricity, cars and telecommunications all learned to love standards as they came of age. At a certain point in their history, it became clear that rather than just fighting to get the largest piece of the pie, the companies within a sector needed to work together to make the pie bigger.

    Without standards, a technology cannot become ubiquitous, particularly when it is part of a larger network. Track gauges, voltage levels, pedal functions, signaling systems — for all of these, technical conventions had to be agreed on before railways, electricity, cars, and telephones were ready for mass consumption. Standards also allow a technology to become automated, thus making it much more reliable and easier to use.”

July 5, 2003

  • Thought

    Wired News: E-Mail Mobs Materialize All Over

    “Flash mobs are performance art projects involving large groups of people. Mobilized by e-mail, a mob suddenly materializes in a public place, acts out according to some loose instructions, and then melts away as quickly as it formed.”

    Anyone know if this is happening in Toronto?

    Now what I’d like to see is a combination of this Japanese “Burly Brawl” with Flash Mobs. “Flash Burly Brawls”?

    discuss

  • Thought

    If you go to the Herman Miller site you’ll see an interesting way of promoting their “revolutionary” Mirra chair, pegged to be the first great chair after the Aeron (which I’m sitting in as I type).

    At the top of the page, you’ll notice a cropped image of the bottom of a Mirra chair. It looks like this:

    Clicking on the chair takes you to a rather large but overall effective Flash animation that explains the key features and benefits of the chair. Given that the chair is being sold using design aesthetics and sexiness as key drivers, this seems very effective.

July 3, 2003

  • Thought

    Lovely article in the Washington Post called “Whoa! Canada!”

    “Just when you had all but forgotten that carbon-based life exists above the 49th parallel, those sly Canadians have redefined their entire nation as Berkeley North.

    “It’s like we woke up and suddenly we’re a European country,” says Canadian television satirist Rick Mercer.”

July 2, 2003

  • Thought

    News.com reports that Overture unveils new ad service. This was, of course, expected given that competitor Google has already announced their similar contextual product.

    “The product, called Content Match, allows Overture to place advertising text links on relevant content Web pages of newly signed distribution partners, which include Microsoft’s MSN and Edmunds.com. The service builds on Overture’s core business of selling commercial placement within search results that appear on partner sites including Yahoo and Microsoft. Advertisers pay Overture a per-click fee for preferred placement in those search results, and Overture splits the sales with its partners.”

  • Thought

    Jakob Nielsen’s latest Alertbox is Information Foraging: Why Google Makes People Leave Your Site Faster

    The article introduces us to “informavores” and the application of foraging strategies in animals to the way that people forage for information on the web. This serves not only as an interesting metaphor in considering web best practices but also reminds us that our sites (from a user’s perspective) are part of one large experience — using the Net and we need to account for this in creating effective sites.

    “The big difference between websites and rabbits is that websites want to be caught. So how can you design a site to make your content attractive to ravenous beasts?

    The two main strategies are to make your content look like a nutritious meal and signal that it’s an easy catch. These strategies must be used in combination: users will leave if the content is good but hard to find, or if it’s easy to find but offers only empty calories.”

  • Thought

    Great Q&A with Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO in Technology Review:

    Well, one big problem is feature creep. Companies feel pressured to add features because they want to put a checkmark in every checkbox in the product review magazines. Home stereos are a perfect example. How many people use one-tenth of the features on their stereo? And, in fact, the most expensive home stereos actually have the fewest features, because those users understand that they actually get in the way of the experience. And so I think what we try and do as designers is use real hard evidence of people in the world to show our clients what things are appropriate and what things aren’t appropriate, and help them have the bravery that they need to be able to resist the temptation. If we didn’t have those checkboxes, a lot of features wouldn’t exist. The other classic example is digital watches, where the cost of adding extra features is so low, that you end up with all these features through this incredibly low bandwidth interface that nobody can ever remember. I love my watch, but if it weren’t for the fact that half the instructions are engraved on the back, I would never remember how to change anything on it. And that’s rather sad, really, considering how long we’ve had digital watches.

June 26, 2003

  • Thought

    This Business 2.0 article gives details on Autobytel’s new contextual ads for competitive products strategy.

    “Here’s how it works. Say you’re interested in a Honda (HMC) Accord. You surf to Autobytel.com and click through to the Accord research page. Splashed across the top, above all that detailed Accord data, is a box labeled “Sponsored by Ford.” It jeers: “The Ford Taurus has a larger engine than the Honda Accord DX.” An adjacent link takes you to the Ford web site for more details on the Taurus where, the theory goes, you’ll soon forget all about the Accord.”

    The biggest issue I see with this approach is Autobytel’s credibility in consumers’ eyes. If someone goes to the site to research Honda’s and sees the page is sponsored by Ford, my guess is many users will be skeptical not only of the sponsored link copy but of the entire page — maybe the entire site.

    Autobytel ends up looking like it is pimping for Ford rather than providing unbiased research on cars.

  • Thought

    Deloitte Consulting’s “Bullfighter” is getting a lot of media and blog coverage:

    “So, we call it our online conscience. Bullfighter is software that runs in Microsoft Word and PowerPoint, within Microsoft Windows 2000 or XP. It works a lot like the spelling and grammar checker in those applications, but focuses on jargon and readability. Download it for free, or order a CD-ROM/book package. Then install it.

    This is a brilliant piece of viral marketing (and also a useful tool for the jargon-prone).

  • Thought

    Clay Shirky is a bright guy. In The Music Business and the Big Flip he writes:

    “The curious thing about this state of affairs is that in other domains, we now use amateur input for finding and publicizing. The last 5 years have seen the launch of Google, Blogdex, Kuro5in, Slashdot, and many other collaborative filtering sites that transform the simple judgments of a few participants into aggregate recommendations of remarkably high quality.

    This is all part of the Big Flip in publishing generally, where the old notion of ‘filter, then publish’ is giving way to ‘publish, then filter.’ There is no need for Slashdot’s or Kuro5hin’s owners to sort the good posts from the bad in advance, no need for Blogdex or Daypop to pressure people not to post drivel, because lightweight filters applied after the fact work better at large scale than paying editors to enforce minimum quality in advance. A side-effect of the Big Flip is that the division between amateur and professional turns into a spectrum, giving us a world where unpaid writers are discussed side-by-side with New York Times columnists.”

June 25, 2003

  • Thought

    Interesting article on the beautiful International Herald Tribune (IHT) site called Google ferrets out a better way to get advertisers.

    Here’s a quote from a happy AdWords user:

    “Before Vavra advertised with Google, she was selling about 10 suits a month over eBay, the online auction site. Then she bought 50 Google keyword ads using her Visa card. The next morning, she said, sales took off. The business has continued to grow; she now sells almost 120 suits a month. She expects to spend $60,000 this year on Google search ads.

    ‘Our business exploded from Google, and Google alone,’ she said.”

  • Thought

    The Reputations Research Network is collecting research on reputation systems (hence the name).

    Reputation and managing it across time and context will be a key role for someone or something on the Net. It will be interesting to see if it is possible to develop a portable reputation (vs. the local reputation users have within systems like eBay or amazon.com).

    Here’s the Reputation Research Networks mission:

    This site is for researchers who are studying how reputation systems should work in theory, how they actually work in practice, and how they could work better. You can find out about people, papers, and practical systems. And you can contribute pointers to useful information.

    Note that the NYT wrote an article about this project called More Companies Pay Heed to Their ‘Word of Mouse’ Reputation.

  • Thought

    AlwaysOn Picks Top 100 Companies for 2003

    The premise of the competition is that consumers and businesses are demanding greater access to the Web for more convenience and productivity, and these demands are beginning to drive the next boom in high technology.

June 20, 2003

  • Thought

    Great analysis on coping With price transparency by Jupiter’s Jared Blank.

    Travel sites should reveal competitors’ rates because consumers don’t believe they are getting a good deal if they don’t shop around. Even better, it will keep consumers on your site. Best-rate guarantees encourage people to shop around. Revealing competitors’ prices discourages the behavior.

  • Thought

    Dave Winer is documenting “what makes a weblog a weblog?”

    “Rather than saying ‘I know it when I see it’ I wanted to list all the known features of weblog software, but more important, get to the heart of what a weblog is, and how a weblog is different from a Wiki, or a news site managed with software like Vignette or Interwoven.”

  • Thought

    I’ve seen some people questioning the wisdom of Google’s AdSense, but overall I think the concept is spot on.

    Contextual advertising is the only kind that will work online in the long run. Of course, AdSense text ads on content pages (as opposed to on Google’s search results pages) will have to have lower clickthroughs, but this misses the point. Since the ads are targeted based on Google’s crawl of the page, the ads should be relatively targeted (read useful) and therefore should give good results when people do click.

    The lower average clickthrough doesn’t matter since the advertiser only pays for results.

    One thing I’d like to see is a way to see (before signing up) what kind of ads they would be serving. My guess is many sites will be nervous about trying this because they don’t want to see competitors or “cheesy” sites advertising on their pages.

  • Thought

    There’s a new site that’s just been launched by Mark Hurst at Good Experience. This Is Broken is looking for visual examples of online and real-world experiences that have clearly gone off the rails.

    That shouldn’t be too hard.

June 19, 2003

  • Thought

    In the June 2003 issue of Business 2.0, John Battelle, wrote a great article called “Putting Online Ads in Context”:

    Let that soak in: This is a new revenue source for the entire Web, one that not only is unobtrusive but, because it’s based on relevance, might even be useful to readers. Contextual advertising “could be much larger than the paid search market,” claims Bill Demas, senior vice president at Overture. Google’s Wojcicki seconds his assertion. For the sake of independent, high-quality content on the Web, we can only hope they are right.

  • Thought

    I’ve been a very silent blogger for the last six weeks or so. I’ve been working on major changes to the company’s service offerings and the changes prompted a much-needed rethinking of this entire site.

    The new site went live today. Hope you like it. Feedback is welcome.

April 28, 2003

  • Thought

    Jakob Nielsen’s intelligent take on text-based (and contextual) advertising is called “Will Plain-Text Ads Continue to Rule?”

    Jakob has always had (justifiably) unkind things to say about “traditional online advertising”, but he likes text ads, provided they are put in context by search results. I think that Jakob overly limits the effectiveness of contextual text ads because if the ads are truly placed in context, they also become a content point, just like other pages on the site the user is visiting. His argument regarding online classified ads being viewed as content not ads by online users is spot on — but it also applies to truly contextual text ads as well.

  • Thought

    Great posting by Brad Templeton regarding the past, present and future of spam called “Reflections on the 25th Anniversary of Spam”. While the history lesson might not be to everyone’s interest, I strongly suggest you read his comments on the current state of spam and his overview of the various solutions that are being proposed. If you are involved in e-mail marketing in any way, you need to start thinking about this stuff.

    (FYI, while I didn’t really know him, Brad and I went to UofW together at the same time and I always saw him wondering around the Math And Computer building. How far we’ve all come.)

April 22, 2003

  • Thought

    The New York Times did a big write-up on E-mail Marketing and Spam — effectively ending the hopes that the two concepts can ever be separated in the public’s mind again. The article uses “marketing” and “junk”, “spammer” and “marketer” as synonyms and offers wonderful examples of spammers making the case against anti-spam advocates (thereby limiting the effectiveness of legitimate e-mailer’s concerns).

    What a mess.

April 10, 2003

  • Thought

    If you search on SARS Virus on Google today you will notice the a “Google Public Service Announcement” at the top of the page linking to the CDC SARS page. Another indication that Google gets that it isn’t like other companies and needs to consider the overall “ecology” of the Net in which it increasingly plays a central role.

    Of course all the sponsored links are to hucksters selling masks and sterilization kits. Ugh.

  • Thought

    Great article called “Permission To Spam?” on ClickZ. Increasingly the challenge with e-mail marketing is going to be getting past the perception that your message is spam — even if you did clearly get permission.

    In the long-run, smart marketers have to begin to temper expectations and realize that they have to make their lists cleaner and their messages more valuable to subscribers if they plan to succeed. For example, I know recommend double opt-in as standard for all lists. Even though it will decrease list size, it eliminates any chance of people not knowing what they signed up for. And you eliminate anyone with over aggressive filters because they never respond to the confirmation list, which means you’re less likely to be sending messages into spam filters.

April 2, 2003

April 1, 2003

  • Thought

    Macromedia put on an interesting Briefing with Forrester Research last week here in Toronto. Summary information is available on the Macromedia site.

    This was the first time I heard (or at least absorbed) the real concept behind Forrester’s “X Internet” concept. Their idea of downloadable applications replacing web pages still sounds silly to me. They are missing the fact that the Internet does many things and deseminating flat, factual data and opinion is one of those things and HTML does it very well. Still, many things we do on the Net are computer assisted tasks that HTML is NOT that good at. Macromedia presented some interesting applications such as a hotel room reservation system that reduced a many stepped HTML process with one dynamic Flash application. This was very compelling and is a good example of where Forrester thinks we’re headed.

    I’d also point out a great use of multimedia in online presentations which Macromedia provided as part of the post-briefing link package. Click on the “Pass along this summary video presentation to your colleagues” link to view.