July 11, 2003
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And I’ll also point you to Google Dance which was referred to somewhat vaguely at the event:
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Since I’ve been poking around in search since the AIMS event earlier this week, I thought I’d point you to this CNET article called “Microsoft brains take on Google”
“Speaking here at the Fifth International Congress on Industrial and Applied Mathematics (ICIAM), professor Jennifer Tour Chayes said Microsoft is patenting new search algorithms with the goal of replacing the Inktomi technology currently powering MSN’s search with Microsoft’s own.
“Since Yahoo acquired Inktomi, Bill (Gates) has decided we need our own capacity,” she said, adding that the company is already patenting new algorithms it believes have the potential to power a new search engine.”
July 10, 2003
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AdSense Sensor
I just launched something I call the “AdSense Sensor”.
Google recently launched AdSense, their contextual ad serving service for small sites.
Using AdSense you (as a site owner) get to place ads served by Google on your site and share revenue with Google. This is exciting because the ads they serve are contextually related to the content on your site. They do this by using their crawl of your pages to determine which ads are relevant.
The first question I asked when looking at the service was ‘what kind of ads will be served on my pages?’ I couldn’t find a way to determine this directly from the Google site (which seems like an oversight to me). So to help us all figure whether AdSense makes sense for us, I created this ‘AdSense Sensor’.
Hope you find it useful!
July 9, 2003
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“Mobile Snaps”
The Economist’s “Mobile Snaps” article says:
Sales of camera-phones are expected to grow from around 19m in 2002 to over 34m this year, according to IDC, a market-research firm. By 2005 they are likely to outsell film and digital cameras put together.
The one issue I have with the comparison of film, digital and phone cams is that most people who buy phone-cams are really buying phones that happen to have cameras in them, not cameras with phones in them.
Without real customer need and usable interface cameras in cell phones will have the same impact on digital photography that web browsers in phones had on Internet browsing — minimal.
My guess is that the value of having a camera with you at all times will cause a real revolution in what people think is “camera worthy”.
We’re seeing a long-term trend where we went from going somewhere to have your portrait taken, to film cameras there were when going on vacation and to birthday parties. Disposables get used as “fun”, and now digital cameras allow high volume snapping and post-picture editing (vs limiting what you snap in the first place to save on film). My guess is that phone-cameras will create a snap-crazy culture that doesn’t look at photos as precious, but rather as a simple way to capture anything visual that needs capturing.
July 8, 2003
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Pissin’ in the great outdoors for fun and profit.
“If you’ve driven through Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois, Pennsylvania or South Carolina this summer, there’s a chance you’ve motored by a billboard or two that caused you to do a bit of a double take. If so, you’re not alone.
The product? Outhouse Springs bottled water.”
In fact, this is a promotion by the outdoor ad company, most likely to prove billboard effectiveness. Note that 10’s of thousands of people have visited the Outhouse Springs website showing that offline channels can easily deliver online traffic (and build buzz).
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Ex Libris Anonymous has a gift idea for the person with everything:
“the book journals are all made from recycled book covers. they are filled with about 75 sheets of 24/60# paper, which is a nice journaling or sketching paper. in the front cover of every book we retain any beautiful cover pages, illustrations, library cards, maps, inscriptions, or what-have-you found in the book (we find all kinds of beautiful stuff in these old books). and it’s all held together with a black plastic spiral.”
Recommended despite the lack of capital letters!
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“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.”
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“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
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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”?
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Writing Social Software is Hard
The always insightful Clay Shirky has posted a very long (almost 10,000 word) essay called “A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy”:
“Writing social software is hard. And, as I said, the act of writing social software is more like the work of an economist or a political scientist. And the act of hosting social software, the relationship of someone who hosts it is more like a relationship of landlords to tenants than owners to boxes in a warehouse.
The people using your software, even if you own it and pay for it, have rights and will behave as if they have rights. And if you abrogate those rights, you’ll hear about it very quickly.”
Shirky gives a great overview of the issues that face all “online communities”, regardless of platform or technology used. After giving historical context by discussing the work of WR Brion, he provides “three things to accept” and “four things to design for”:
Accept
1. You cannot separate technical and social issues.
2. Members are different from users.
3. The core group has rights that trump individual users.
Design
1. Create “handles” (identities) that users can invest in.
2. Create a way for there to be “members in good standing”.
3. Create barriers to participation. (The group is the user, not the individual and creating barriers ensures that the group gets better signal-to-noise and this is better than maximizing individual ease of use.)
4. Find a way to spare the group from scale.
While the essay may be a bit long and theoretical for the casual reader, I recommend the article strongly for anyone interested in online group interaction. Learn from the mistakes of others! As Shirky points out:
“Now, this story has been written many times. It’s actually frustrating to see how many times it’s been written. You’d hope that at some point that someone would write it down, and they often do, but what then doesn’t happen is other people don’t read it.
The most charitable description of this repeated pattern is “learning from experience.” But learning from experience is the worst possible way to learn something. Learning from experience is one up from remembering. That’s not great. The best way to learn something is when someone else figures it out and tells you: “Don’t go in that swamp. There are alligators in there.”
Learning from experience about the alligators is lousy, compared to learning from reading, say. There hasn’t been, unfortunately, in this arena, a lot of learning from reading. And so, lessons from Lucasfilms’ Habitat, written in 1990, reads a lot like Rose Stone’s description of Communitree from 1978.
This pattern has happened over and over and over again.”
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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
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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
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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.”
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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.”
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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
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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.
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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).
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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
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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I’ve just added an RSS Feed to this page. Let me know if it gives you any trouble.
June 20, 2003
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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.
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Jakob Nielsen’s most recent Alertbox called “Diversity is Power for Specialized Sites” gives some statistical back-up to the idea of nano-publishing and niche specialization.
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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.”
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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.
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CNET’s Declan McCullagh has done some analysis on the Council of Europe’s proposal about online speech.
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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
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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.
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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.