If you own a local business and you’re not listed in Google’s Local Business directory, you are missing out on a valuable (and free) targeted marketing opportunity. Google allows business owners to freely add their business contact information to the directory and will display these listings above natural results when users search for local services (i.e. Photographers in Duxbury, MA).
Additionally, you can categorize your business, add photos and videos, specify your hours and payment options and even offer coupons.
Looking at Omniture this morning, Google’s Chrome browser is already the # 4 browser on Computerworld.com today. Computerworld’s readers have always seemed ahead of the browser curve, but this is impressive considering the completely new browser launched yesterday. Here’s the breakdown:
1. Mozilla Firefox 3.0 - 27.9%
2. Microsoft Internet Explorer 7.0 - 26.8%
3. Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 - 18.9%
4. Google Chrome Beta - 8.8%
I doubt Chrome can sustain those numbers in the short term, but after playing around with it (and making it my default browser) I think the reduced CPU usage alone could launch it ahead of Firefox very quickly.
When I read about Google’s move to mainstream RSS on ReadWriteWeb, I was shocked at how obvious this was. However, there’s still one giant hurdle new users will face with RSS regardless of the terminology we use in links: The landing page.
Helping people understand RSS has been a pain point of the amazingly useful technology since it first popped up on blogs several years ago. Whether it was “Subscribe to RSS” or consistent icons, everything else fell short. “Follow this *(blog, site, topic, whatever)” gets to the point immediately and should help users know what to expect when clicking on the link.
But when a user lands on a traditional RSS page (listing of the last 10 or so links) with various calls to action to subscribe via various RSS readers, we still haven’t got there. Google has an advantage. They own one of the largest blog platforms and arguably the best RSS reader. They can seamlessly tie the two together. Publishers that don’t use Blogger don’t have that luxury.
That’s why I’d encourage Google Reader (and other RSS readers) to make it simple for publishers to mimic the functionality they’re proposing for Blogger. Imagine if all the “Digg This” links in the world simply took a user to the Digg homepage and required them to figure out how to add the story they were just on. RSS is even more complicated after the “Follow this” click simply because of the number of confusing options presented to the user.
I envision the process looking something like this:
User clicks on “Follow this…” link
User is presented with 2 options
“Follow this…” using [[Publisher's preferred reader]]
“Advanced users” follow using your existing reader
If option 1: user creates a simple account and the feed they clicked is added to their reading list
Feel free to pick this idea apart in the comments below.
I stumbled onto Noah Brier’s Brand Tags concept today (a little late) and was pleasantly surprised by what I found. The concept is simple: display a company’s logo/brand and have a viewer type in the first word or phrase that enters their mind. Marketers and researchers have been doing this forever, but never on this scale. Sure, the Internet, with it’s techie nature, skews the results a bit, but the results are fascinating.
Here are some examples:
Comcast - The cable conglomerate everyone loves to hate. The top 3 words are “cable”, “internet”, “tv”… their basic services… good so far. But it gets ugly quick with words like “evil”, “expensive”, “crap”, “sucks”, “monopoly”, “ripoff”… it gets worse…
Compare Comcast to Klondike’s top 3 words: “ice cream”, “bar”, “cold”… more simple terms about their products, but instead of “evil” their marketing slogan (”what would you do”) comes next. And most suprisinlgy, the word I entered “Yummy” comes in 5th. Think about that. Of all the words that mean tasty, “yummy” was the 5th highest word/phrase people associated with Klondike. Klondike’s marketing head needs a raise.
If you’ve never seen this site, I encourage you to look around and ponder what people would say about your brand… and then do something to help improve that.
Check out this great article at A List Apart on Developing Creative Ideas. Idea creation and development is a key part of my role and this article has some great tips on how to drive innovation out of an idea sessions (brainstorm). Getting a group of people together to be creative is never an easy task and having tools like these in your back pocket will always be useful.
Hackalytics.com is a social bookmarking tool for web analytics news, articles, jobs and more. Simply create an account to contribute links, vote and save the links you find most valuable and discuss links to share more information.
The site is based on Hacker News (which is technically based on Reddit) so I’m hoping the interface will be familiar.
This site is a work in progress and I value any feedback you may have. Feel free to leave comments below if you have any suggestions or see any bugs.
I’ve been thinking a lot about tagging and entity extraction lately (I know, exciting!). We use Inform on most of our properties and they perform very well, but new techniques and tools are all over the place. One of those tools is Open Calais by Reuters.
I immediately added both the archive and auto tagger to this site to test it out. While it came up with some odd suggestions and omitted some obvious ones (I tested a Computerworld article about MS Vista, and it didn’t recommend “Vista”), I was optimistic with this first test. Even for this post, Calais wasn’t perfect, missing the obvious “Open Calais” and “Wordpress” as key entities offering up only “API” and “Reuters” as tag suggestions. Calais is far from perfect, but a promising step in the right direction.
The Calais Wordpress plugin itself was very impressive, integrating seamlessly with Wordpress’ native tagging functionality. Basically, you can use Calais to recommend tags and then redefine them (adding/removing) as you see fit. Open Calais is officially on my watch list.
Aetna Fire Alarm needed an online tool to allow clients to login and view their building alarm tests and needed it quick. To save time, I reused Wordpress’ admin design, but developed the application completely from scratch to meet Aetna’s unique requirements including CSV file importing and exporting, multiple building address searches and bar coded device integration.
I worked closely with Aetna and their clients to ensure the product met everyone’s needs and delivered it on time and on budget.
Hancock Builders was one of my first clients and has been working with me for about 5 years. They recently decided that it was time to update their 5-year old website and once again turned to me for direction. Together, we came up with the new HancockBuilders.com, a site that better reflects their professional construction experience and brings the site up to “Web 2.0″ standards.
The site utilizes some advanced slideshow and gallery techniques which add a nice aesthetic while also improving the user experience.
New Leaf realigned their focus and brand (from Productions to Speakers) and needed an updated website to reflect this new direction. Working closely with the client, I took her well planned out vision and turned it into NewLeafSpeakers.com, a functional showcase of her services and speakers.
The site is built on Wordpress and allows her to update most aspects of the site herself.
Another side-project of mine over the last few months has been Feedcrush.com. If you like music and discovering new artists, Feedcrush is a great place to see what one of the top college radio stations in the country is playing.
The site simply tracks radio station (WERS in Boston) song plays over time (currently, about 16 months worth). You can comment and rate songs and there are links to listen to most songs. Eventually I plan on trending the play data for patterns , but haven’t gotten around to it. I still think there’s a “bigger” idea here, but I haven’t had time to fully work it out either.
The design was inspired by Gmail’s “labels” tool. While I was testing the application, I was receiving automated emails that I filtered into a red Feedcrush Gmail label. After seeing it for about a week, I thought, “that would make a cool ‘logo’”. The Flash graphs are powered by amCharts.
My biggest hurdle to date has been data normalization. WERS’s play lists rely on DJs to manually enter the song data, which can get ugly fast. While I do some cleaning to remove extra spaces etc, I’ve yet to accommodate differences like “&” vs “and” or misspellings. If you have any thoughts, feel free to share them in the comments below.
Not sure how many of you even noticed that I redesigned this site earlier in the week, but I did. And I absolutely hated it! So I redesigned it again. This could be the fastest redesign in the history of the Interwebs (I doubt it).
At any rate, this new template still needs some work, but trust me, it’s leaps and bounds above the last design.
Google launched their ambitious App Engine today which reportedly allows you to “build web applications on the same scalable systems that power Google applications.”
I’m a little worried about just how “scalable” they are considering I received the following error when trying to sign up.
“This Google App Engine application is temporarily over its serving quota. Please try again later.”
Apparently Google built the App Engine sign-up form with a restricted App Engine account. I guess I’ll try again later.
Everyone is familiar with the notion of Blogrolls–linking to other blogs that you read or admire. But how come there isn’t a standard way to link to the sites you borrow code or icon sets from? Why not give these sites credit when you build something with their original work?
So I’m coining the phrase “Coderoll” and will begin adding it to the sites I create. Feel free to do the same.
After using 37signals’ TaDaList task tool and being dissapointed by the lack of functionality, I found myself thinking, “I can do better than this.” So I did, I think. Sure, it’s not as flashy as TaDaList and it’s not built on Rails (OMG!), but it suites my needs and I think it might work for a few of you as well. Try out Task Tracker now.
Key features (not available in TaDaList):
Dates: Sort your task lists by date
Tags: Sort your task list by tag or keyword
Friends: Assign/receive tasks from friends and family
Views: View all of your tasks at once regardless of date or tag
Esquire recently published an article title, “A Few Music-Related Discussion Questions” on its website. I’m going to assume that this article came from Esquire’s April issue and is a perfect example of a media company not quite getting it.
Sure, Esquire Magazine is a good example of “experiential media”–the notion that certain print magazines give their readers an experience that cannot be recreated online.
But their online publication is lacking severely. While readers are given the ability to share the story with friends and social networks, they can’t actually comment on any of the questions posed in the article. That’s right folks, it’s 2008 and Esquire.com still doesn’t offer commenting on articles.
If your magazine is strong enough to be considered “experiential media” don’t you think you’d pay extra attention to your online presence, attempting to recreate that brand affinity online?
So I’ve been playing around with Yahoo’s Buzz a bit and so far I’m not impressed. According to the site, “Yahoo! Buzz features the most popular stories right now, determined by people around the Web. A story’s Buzz Score is based on your votes, searches, emails, and more.” But confusing UI, ambiguity around how stories appear and a few too many Yahoo News stories has Buzz feeling rather blah.
Here are a couple glaring problems with the service:
First off, it feels more like a Google News than a Digg. But that’s a good thing right? Not when your top sports story is a satirical blog post titled, “AWOL Garnett Captured in China.” I’m not a big NBA fan and immediately clicked on the headline believing it to be real. Buzz needs to figure out it’s identity and embrace it so future readers are not duped by these types of stories.
Secondly, and I’m picking a bit on the sports section here, 8 of the top 10 stories in sports right now comes from Yahoo News. I’m all for self-promotion, but are 80% of the “most popular stories” in sports only on Yahoo? I doubt it.
There also seems to be some oddness around how stories become buzz-worthy. The number 1 story in Lifestyle is “Beefy Tortilla Soup is great for busy nights” yet it has no votes. I’m confused.
A bit off-topic, but I found this data on the population of Online worlds to be enlightening. I knew World of Warcraft was big, but 10,000,000 active subscriptions!? That’s huge!
After spending 3+ weeks developing the 3 widgets mentioned here previously (I may be biased, but ours are still higher quality), I’m amazed at how quickly one could build professional-looking widgets with Sprout. There’s obvious limitations and a good Flash designer could take your branded widget to much higher places, but Sprout lowers the bar to entry significantly. Any blog owner or even Facebook profile owner could build their own widget now.
I don’t care that Sprout doesn’t seem to have a revenue model, the tool is damn cool and I’d advise jumping into their beta before they figure out they should be charging for this. Read the rest of this entry »
We launched 2 more widgets last week. I’m still not completely sold on the concept of widgets yet, but I’ll admit we’re seeing some positive signs from the CIO widget already. They didn’t take all that much time to build and now that we have a framework, we can quickly create similar widgets.
The book is still out on widgets, but I’m cautiously optimistic on their performance.
Federated Media, by its own account, “support[s] independent website authors and audiences, by connecting them to marketers.” Loosely translated, this means the only asset they have is their relationship between external publishers and marketers. No content. No product. And No loyalty (as far as I can tell, FM’s big publishers do not have to sign exclusive or non-compete deals). Sure, FM has some impressive blogs, powered by the flagship BoingBoing (nice to have friends with really big websites), but the right marketer (or better yet, salesperson) could come along with a more attractive offer and Digg, TechCrunch and the rest would move on without a moments notice.
The company employs over 50 people, so they’re doing something right, but networks are ripe for pilfering. Someone can always come along with a shinier offer and higher CPM and you can quickly lose inventory.
I don’t know John personally, but our lives have crossed indirectly at IDG and with our interest in ad networks, but I would strongly urge him to cash out.
We recently partnered with Clearspring to host our suite of widgets. The CIO Wanted widget below is the first one out the gate.
Rather than widgeting every piece of content in our database, my goal is to develop widgets that are actually useful to readers. We have two more in development that should be launching soon. I’m not sure how well these will perform, but they are an experiment well worth the effort.
Big thanks to Shaun, Matt, Bob and the Clearspring team for getting this one out so quickly! Read the rest of this entry »
As a key stakeholder in a hand-selected technology blog network, I’ve had a unique view into the evolution of the blogosphere and I can’t say I’m impressed by where it’s going. Thanks to easy money from Google and other blind ad networks, anyone (I won’t call these people bloggers) can make a quick buck by “farming page views”. Similar to the hated practice in online multiplayer games where hoards of low-income workers spend all day farming virtual gold to resell to lazy gamers, page view farmers profit from lazy media buyers, content with blindly forking over cash to Google in exchange for “contextual” clicks.
Since Google and media buyers don’t care where the page view originates, tens of thousands of page view farming sites have cropped up. From the blatant parked domain and plagiarized “blog” to the “link blog” and “copy blog” (featuring a quick comment on whatever is hot online today), these sites are easy to create and even easier to profit from (if you throw up enough of them). But I don’t care how good Google’s algorithms are, a click from a visitor to the parked domain, “cellphones.com” is not valuable to anyone other than the guy that owns the domain. Read the rest of this entry »
As a person constantly searching for new ideas and consequently domain names, I’ve always sort of wondered/half-suspected domain registrars’ ethics regarding domain lookups. They obviously have access to some very valuable data (the domain names I am researching) and could potentially lock them down so I couldn’t register them elsewhere or so I would have to pay a premium.
According to several sources (both sites currently down due to Slashdot), Network Solutions is “front-running” domain names, meaning they are registering them as soon as you search for them so you can’t buy them from other domain name service.
While this is ethically questionable, is it really bad business? As a site visitor, you’re using their service and submitting valuable data willingly. Who says they can’t use it to prevent their competition from profiting off of their services? Its not entirely different from Google’s business model. You submit valuable data about your intent (a search query) and they profit by posting relevant ads on the results. Read the rest of this entry »
While I’m enjoying my new role at IDG, I’ve got to admit being the “Director of Other” at Google would be serious fun.
Apparently 10% of time at Google is devoted to “new and unrelated businesses” and this position would be responsible for ushering that time into tangible initiatives, products and services.
I can’t even imaging the volume of resumes pouring into HR’s inbox for this one, so rather than sending mine to the black hole, I’ll let this blog post serve as notice of my interest in the position. So if you’re listening Google, give me a call. (via Tech Dispenser) Read the rest of this entry »
I talk a lot about innovation and new product development in publishing, but now its time for me to walk the walk. I recently accepted a new position within my company as the Director of Product Development for the online publications of Computerworld, Infoworld and CXO Media. While I’ve had mixed emotions about letting my old role go, this is a great opportunity for me and I’m very excited to dive into this very cool role.
So what will I be doing? Lots of things (as always). My responsibilities include “evaluating potential products and enhancements through market research, business analysis and ROI modeling, building business plans and performing market analysis to justify resources for product development and ‘own’ the product and serve as its expert and evangelist across multiple relationships” among other things.
Basically, I will be driving product development through research, ROI projections and detailed requirements gathering. I’m still transitioning out of my old role, but will keep this site updated on my progress.
According to this MSN video, Google’s original chef and 53rd employee Charlie Ayers, owns about $26mm worth of Google stock. The video goes on to point out a bunch of other people and companies that have profited from Google’s success.
Check out this great article at 
I’ve been thinking a lot about tagging and entity extraction lately (I know, exciting!). We use 
