September 15, 2003

  • Thought

    Major web buzz is building on this:

    “Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht frist and lsat ltteer is at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by it slef but the wrod as a wlohe. ceehiro.”

    Check out languagehat.com for some of the most insightful discussion.

    (via Joi and bb)

September 14, 2003

  • Seth and I Do The Technorati Dance

    Seth Godin was nice enough to drop by this page a few days ago.

    How do I know? FeedDemon and Technorati.

    I subscribe to Seth’s Blog and read his feed using FeedDemon. Seth most likely subscribes to an RSS Feed from Technorati that tells him whenever someone posts something pointing to his site.

    A few days ago I posted about Seth and just below it I provided some perspective on RSS as a marketing tool. When Seth followed my link to see what I said about him, he read my RSS post and pointed his readers to my post:

    “It’s a tricky topic, but I’m going to start taking us through it over the next few weeks. Ken Schafer’s Blog is way ahead of me.”

    And so Seth and I complete the Technorati two-step as I (one of Seth’s humble readers) am told to go visit my own site.

    Note that, unlike a mailing list, I can’t “see” that Seth came and I don’t know if he has now subscribed to my RSS feed because you don’t get a subscriber list when you publish RSS. The only way I’ll know if Seth does subscribe is if he responds, say to the “Don’t Call It RSS” post below.

    BUT, what are the chances that Seth would have subscribed to my newsletter had I posted my thoughts in that format instead?

  • Thought

    Church of the Customer: Rip Van Record, Part II:

    “Obviously, the Internet is the best channel to share knowledge; when intellectual capital is shared with multiple online networks, it can spread quickly to others who naturally gravitate toward it. (We call this ‘Napsterizing your knowledge.’) Sharing knowledge is not the end-game; it’s the marketing. The next level is finding value that enthusiasts will pay for. Like Bowie says, performing will become exponentially more important for musicians. We would add that maintaining strong relationships with fans — their customers — has never been more important for artists than it is today.”

  • Don’t Call It RSS

    In reading Sam Ruby’s RSS presentation to Seybold I was once again struck by the variety of standards, non-standards, and standards-in-waiting that get generically lumped together as “RSS” in a non-technical setting.

    My concern is that “RSS” is too cryptic, unintuitive, and inaccurate to encompass all we mean by “RSS”. And I’m also looking for an over-arching metaphor that can be used to describe aspects and things related to “RSS”.

    Let’s look at e-mail as a starting point in developing a “grand metaphor” for “RSS”.

    The term “e-mail” means “electronic mail” an easily understood metaphor devoid of acronyms. Once a user grasps the basic metaphor, all the accompanying metaphors are self-evident.

    So a new user quickly learns that:

    “It’s mail, but on your computer. Instead of typing a letter then printing and mailing it, you just send it from your computer outbox to the other person’s computer inbox over the Internet. The Internet acts as the printer, the envelope and postal service.”

    The mail metaphor is all-encompassing of the technology. Almost everything related to e-mail uses metaphorical equivalents from physical mail — “inbox”, “message”, “check your mailbox”, “you’ve got mail”, “cc”, “newsletter subscribers”, etc. We use a flying envelope as its symbol without a second thought. Acronyms are buried in administrative settings.

    Imagine if instead of using this grand metaphor e-mail had instead been commonly referred to by the underlying technical specifications (as RSS is):

    “It’s a POP2/SMTP reader. You use it to download POP3 or IMAP feeds from a remote server and compose SMTP replies that a recipient can read using their POP2/SMTP reader. Oh yeah, no one uses POP2 but that’s still what it’s called because that was the original standard people used.”

    What we need is an grand metaphor for everything related to all aspects of this:

    “The process by which a publisher provides recurring content that people can read via applications that automatically check for new content from all publishers the reader chooses to monitor.”

    Right now we talk about “RSS”, “Syndication”, “Feeds”, “Channels”, “Subscriptions”, “Publish and Subscribe”, “Readers”, “Aggregators”, “NewReaders”, etc. None of these terms provide the over-arching metaphor I think we need to really move RSS past the tipping point with average users.

    A global RSS metaphor would have to:

    1. Clearly capture the essence of the process defined above.

    2. Provide “sub-metaphors” for all processes, people and things related to the global metaphor, and do so consistently. (i.e. no mixed metaphors)

    3. Be easy for non-industry types to understand, explain, spell, and remember.

    4. Should not overlap with metaphors already used online. (I don’t think you can have multiple metaphors in the same medium, but that may be open for debate)

    5. Should not get over-extended and tacky.

    What might this grand metaphor be?

    Discuss

September 12, 2003

  • Thought

    ClickZ: Making Sense of AdSense… Et Al.:

    “Search engine marketing (SEM) and publishing content intersect, now that Google and Overture have entered into contextual publishing of keyword-based ad listings. This column considers matters from both the publisher and marketer perspectives.”

  • Thought

    CNET News.com: Groups push ad-tracking standard:

    “The standard, called the Ad-ID platform, is a Web-based method for coding any type of ad linked to a digital delivery system, such as interactive TV or on-demand cable. Under Ad-ID, all advertisements get a 12-digit unique identifier that’s used to track them from creation to distribution. The identifier lets an ad agency and a distributor share data and lets ads be linked to analysis such as demographic data on people to whom the ads have been delivered.”

  • At Home With Hitler

    Tom Coates has posted scans of an old British Home and Gardens magazine the includes a feature called “Hitler’s Mountain Home”.

    Because the article is written in gushing “better homes” language and is oblivious to the world war Herr Hitler will start less than a year after the article first appeared, it provides some unintendedly hilarious copy (if anything about Hitler can be called hilarious):

    “The Fuhrer is his own decorator, designer, and furnisher, as well as architect. He is constantly enlarging the place, building new guest annexes, and arranging in these his favourite antiques — chiefly German furniture of the eighteenth century, or which agents in Munich are on the look out.

    It is a mistake to suppose that week-end guest are all, or even mainly State officials…”

    (via Joi Ito)

September 11, 2003

  • Thought

    ClickZ: RSS: A Medium for Marketers:

    “Online publishers have swarmed to RSS. It’s a medium marketers cannot ignore. Can you move 100 percent of your e-mail list to RSS overnight? No. But if you are concerned about false positives, are serious about opt-in, and have content your customers or prospects want, take a look at RSS. The barriers to entry are low, and the potential return is high.”

    When will ClickZ offer an RSS Feed? The newsletters that I’ve subscribed for a while that don’t offer an RSS feed suddenly feel very old-fashioned. I kind of feel like I did during the early days of the web when I decided I didn’t care about companies and products that didn’t have websites.

  • Thought

    Seth’s Blog: Lesson from yesterday’s seminar:

    “He didn’t know. He just wanted to make it better. “I haven’t updated it in a few years. How do I make it better?” He was looking for tactics, then he was going to invent a strategy to match. After a few seconds, he realized exactly what he was saying. Of course our tactics wouldn’t solve his problem because he didn’t know what his problem was!”

    It still amazes me that most sites are built and maintained without any sense of why or to what end they even exist.

  • Feeding Ads Through Feeds

    Lockergnome’s RSS Resource: Feeding Ads Through Feeds

    The conversation around RSS Marketing is heating up quickly.

    A few quick observations:

    1. It’s nice to think that everyone will make rich useful content free to all users unencumbered by ads to support the production of that rich useful content, but it is unlikely that we live in that world. Most people like to get a cheque from someone at some time for their efforts. People do things for non-monetary reasons, but businesses don’t. Individuals may blog and provide RSS feeds for reasons other than money, but in the long-run, companies won’t.

    1. Publishers will need to decide if they want to use RSS as a notification or a delivery system.

    2. If you use RSS as a notification system, there is no need to advertise directly within the RSS feed. The goal of the feed is to compel readers to click through to the site for details. Once on the site the publisher can execute their revenue model — paid or ad-based as if the reader had come to the site through other channels. My guess is that many marketers will be compelled to insert out of context, irrelevant ads into feeds and those efforts will fail. I’d also suggest that for most businesses, this is where they want to concentrate their efforts. How can you use RSS to drive traffic to your site?

    3. If you use RSS as a delivery system, you need to figure out why you are doing so. I see a few options:

    a) To generate revenue directly from the RSS feed. You could send ads or “ad-like” content to users but you’d want to be very careful about clearly explaining the value to the reader and keeping reader-benefit at the top of your mind whenever you “feed the feed.” My guess is this will be the hardest category to figure out, but also the most profitable for those that get it right.

    b) To create awareness of your product, service, stance on an issue, expertise, etc. so that the reader will take a future action. I blog and support an RSS feed so that people are aware of my company’s best practices services. I am therefore quite happy to provide all my content via the feed because the reading of the content by an interested audience meets my goals.

    c) To charge for the content delivered. I don’t know enough about the technical and business issues around charging for RSS feeds to comment on this at this time.

    This conversation is just starting but my sense is that it is moving much quicker than it did when we first thought of marketing via e-mail. Let’s hope we learn from past experience.

  • Global Rich List

    I just discovered the Global Rich List via Wired. I love the concept and the site, but I did feel compelled to send them this constructive criticism:

    Hi there,

    I love the site and the message behind it. Well done!

    Three small suggestions:

    1. The site design is fantastic, but the background image of stacks of money is visually very distracting. It made my eyes “buzz” all over the place. It also makes it look at first glance like it will be an anti-money screed (looking like old socialist “money bags” imagery). I’d suggest removing the image and going with a white background or a light shade of grey.

    2. The graph of global income doesn’t seem to make sense. The axis labeled “billion people” seems to imply that six billion people’s income is right off the chart it is so high. I know that’s not what you meant, but that chart says that.

    3. The “spread the word” banner seems to have the message backwards. Promoting “I’m the richest” doesn’t seem to be what you want to have people talking about, rather you want them to think about the fact that “There are 5,280,616,966 people poorer than me”.

    Good luck with the project! I’d add links to CARE in the US and Canada to really boost giving!

  • Thought

    CNET News.com: “P2P group: We’ll pay girl’s RIAA bill”

    “P2P United, a peer-to-peer industry trade group that includes Grokster, StreamCast Networks, Limewire and other file-trading software companies, said Wednesday it had offered to reimburse Brianna Lahara and her mother’s payment to the Recording Industry Association of America. Lahara’s mother agreed Tuesday to settle copyright infringement charges on behalf of her daughter.”

    Brianna could end up making a few dollars for a college education if this keeps up!

  • Thought

    “The RIAA Are Dicks. We Apologize.”

    “In any good community, people take care of each other. If someone is robbed, people put in what they can to help them out. Therefore, I am planning to raise $2,000 for this girl (the cost of her settlement), because I think she’s been robbed by the RIAA. Other folks tend to agree with me.”

September 10, 2003

  • First Spotting of “ALT Tag Ads”

    I just saw a new ad format that I haven’t come across before. I’m not sure if there is a technical name for this, but here’s what happens and how to experience it.

    1. Go to Designtechnica Reviews Sony VAIO TR1A Review. Scoll down to the body of the review.

    2. Wait about 20 seconds. See those double-underlined links? They’re ads:

    3. Hoovering over the link shows an “ALT Tag Ad” (I guess), and clicking takes you to the advertised site.

    While I guess I’d give this technique points for being in context, I’d have to deduct those very same points for deviousness as I’m not sure that users would expect ads in the middle of a review for a different product. Maybe the site has a clear description of their editorial policy and an explaination of these links, but I didn’t see it.

    Has anyone seen this before? Is it a formal ad product provided by a third party? What are they called?

  • Thought

    Editor & Publisher: It’s Time to Blog Hard News on Your Site:

    “The great thing about the blog concept for breaking news is that it puts online news organizations on the same speed footing as television. You could even argue that this model outdoes TV news, because a news Web site can publish a new bit of information instantly. TV news operations can do that too, but it’s impractical to interrupt non-news regular programming for all but the most urgent of headlines. The Web doesn’t have that limitation.”

    The entire article is really great — Steve Outing clearly gets it. I also found the “Letters” section at the bottom of the page worth reading as it provides several responses to Steve’s popular article on RSS replacing E-mail Newsletters.

  • Thought

    Globetechnology: Concept car cruises information highway:

    “Baka Trak-IT, a wireless company, has stuffed a concept car built by Daimler Chrysler with the latest in wireless technology, including wide-area and local wireless networks (Wi-Fi), and called it the Baka Wireless Freedom Smart Car.”

  • No More Blogger Pro

    I just got an e-mail from Evan Williams:

    Hi there. Evan Williams here, co-founder of Pyra/Blogger.

    I wanted to give you a heads-up about something we’re announcing shortly: We’re no longer offering Blogger Pro as a separate product and we’re folding most of the features into regular (free) Blogger.

    It’s sad but true. (Except it’s not really that sad.)

    Don’t worry — nothing you paid for is going away. And while you won’t be charged, your subscription is still valid. You will continue to have access to features like RSS and post-via-email that are still not in the free version. You’ll also have priority support from our expanded team and new support system:http://help.blogger.com .

    More importantly, I want to stress that we couldn’t have gotten to where we are today without you. Pro subscribers helped keep us going as a struggling start-up, when servers and bandwidth were at an extreme premium. We wanted to keep basic Blogger free, but we needed to start charging in order to keep the lights on. So we built new things that would appeal to some Blogger users (namely, you).

    Thanks to supportive people like yourself, this plan allowed us to grow and build a better service — and, eventually, get us to much more stable ground. We’re eternally grateful, and I hope you were happy with the relationship, as well.

    Today, as you may know, Blogger’s situation is much different.

    For one thing, we’re part of Google. (If you missed that announcement, check the FAQ).

    Google has lots of computers and bandwidth. And Google believes blogs are important and good for the web.

    This is a good thing.

    So we’re in the fortunate position of being able to give back to our users. Specifically, we want give all of you who paid for Pro, a Blogger hoodie as a way of saying thanks. Just go to [url] by October 1, 2003 to claim yours.

    We feel this move will be good for all Blogger users, and we’re excited about the many new things we have in the pipeline. Stay tuned.

    Thanks again,

    Ev.

    That’s got to be one of the nicest e-mail messages I’ve received. In fact, when I started using blogger, I loved it so much I felt compelled to sign up for the Pro version specifically so that those guys would get a bit of cash to keep the thing going. Being thanked felt really good.

  • Thought

    Fascinating ad campaign currently running all over the web for Linux (by IBM). You should watch the ad on their site:

    “If Linux were a person, he would be growing, fast. Taught by the best. Gaining wisdom beyond his years. And sharing. He would be in business, education, government and homes. He would be a nine-year-old boy changing the world.”

    The spot has some cameo appearances by Coach John R. Wooden, Sylvia Nasar, Penny Marshall and Muhammad Ali.

  • Thought

    The Register: Web Sites That Crash:

    “Nine out of ten people have been forced to abandon an online transaction because the application failed before completion.”

September 9, 2003

  • Thought

    AlwaysOn: Broadband Behavior: I Want My Info Now!:

    “Tenure online has a profound impact on behavior. The longer you’re online, the more your behavior changes, the more you adapt, the more likely you are to be in an always-on environment and the more likely that will accelerate the change in your behavior. According to a UCLA study that AOL participated in, 50% of online users in the United States have been online for four years or more; 27% six years or more. That is a line of demarcation. Behavior starts to really change after four years. Our research says that tenure and an always-on environment go hand in hand. The environment mirrors the tenure effect, and they both affect user behavior.”

  • Thought

    I found this particularly sad. My copy of PaidContent’s e-mail newsletter today included this disclaimer at the top: “I have made some deliberate mis-spellings, for obvious reasons.”

    Here is the e-mailed version of an article:

    Here is the web version:

    Note 1: Even the LINKS were misspelled in the newsletter making them useless.

    Note 2: The RSS Feed from PaidContent is based on the newsletter so even if you read the feed instead of the newsletter (I read the feed), you still get the typos and wrong links.

    I’d suggest that we all just spell things the way they are supposed to be spelled, and say what we want to say, damn the poorly thought-out spam filters.

  • Thought

    Boxes and Arrows: Natural Selections: Colors Found in Nature and Interface Design:

    “From complex web applications to informative “brochure-ware” sites, naturally occurring color combinations have the potential to distinguish (by helping create a more memorable website), guide (by allowing users to focus on interactions), engage (by making page layouts comfortable and more inviting), and inspire (by offering new ideas for color selection).”

    The article offers some great ideas on getting out of the “techno-color” rut. I particularly liked that the author used compelling photography as the foundation for a naturalistic color scheme. To a certain extent, this is cribbing colors from photographers instead of graphic artists because the photographer is still deciding on what is photographed and how. Still, this technique should be very useful.

  • Thought

    Not exactly a response, but PaidContent is watching response to Shirky’s article:

    “Clay Shirky writes another article on micropayments which is bound to create huge ripples in the industry…the last one he wrote practically killed the industry in its infancy.”

    Instead of detailed analysis, Rafat points to other people’s analysis.

September 8, 2003

  • Thought

    Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox: Misconceptions About Usability:

    “Misconceptions about usability’s expense, the time it involves, and its creative impact prevent companies from getting crucial user data, as does the erroneous belief that existing customer-feedback methods are a valid driver for interface design.”

September 6, 2003

  • Thought

    The Seattle Times (Dan Gillmor): Latest wave of newsreader software beats e-mail:

    “Every morning I learn the latest from a variety of news organizations, Weblogs, newsletters and other online information sources. But I don’t use my e-mail program or go surfing from Web site to Web site.”

  • Thought

    Clay Shirky: Fame vs Fortune: Micropayments and Free Content:

    “Free content is thus what biologists call an evolutionarily stable strategy. It is a strategy that works well when no one else is using it — it’s good to be the only person offering free content. It’s also a strategy that continues to work if everyone is using it, because in such an environment, anyone who begins charging for their work will be at a disadvantage. In a world of free content, even the moderate hassle of micropayments greatly damages user preference, and increases their willingness to accept free material as a substitute.

    Furthermore, the competitive edge of free content is increasing. In the 90s, as the threat the Web posed to traditional publishers became obvious, it was widely believed that people would still pay for filtering. As the sheer volume of free content increased, the thinking went, finding the good stuff, even if it was free, would be worth paying for because it would be so hard to find.

    In fact, the good stuff is becoming easier to find as the size of the system grows, not harder, because collaborative filters like Google and Technorati rely on rich link structure to sort through links. So offering free content is not just an evolutionary stable strategy, it is a strategy that improves with time, because the more free content there is the greater the advantage it has over for-fee content.”

    It will be interesting to see if Rafat Ali has a response.