Tom Pimental : Web Creative

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:

1. User clicks on “Follow this…” link
2. User is presented with 2 options
1. “Follow this…” using [[Publisher's preferred reader]]
2. “Advanced users” follow using your existing reader
3. 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.

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.

Open Calais is an open source API for automatically extracting keywords from text. I hadn’t had time to fiddle with it until I heard that someone had created an Open Calais WordPress Plugin.

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.

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.

Check out Task Tracker’s Coderoll

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?

Apparently, I was wrong about Yahoo Buzz.

According to TechCrunch, Salon and TechCrunch both experienced their best traffic days ever when linked to by Yahoo Buzz. That’s an impressive feat for a site that’s only 2 weeks old, even if it’s Yahoo.

Sure, Yahoo has a massive pool of audience to draw on, but topping the records for the 2 sites above is no minor feat.

In case you missed the message of this post, go and get your site on Yahoo Buzz right now!