Yahoo! Talks Spelling

An amusing look at the troubles with building a spell check feature into a search engine: Yahoo! Search blog: How's Your Speling?

Better Banking Means More than Orange: It Means Better Relationships and Better Communities

Katherine Stone shares some excellent ideas about The Banking Experience at Decent Marketing.

Her thoughts concerning ING's approach to retail banking are also thoughtful and interesting.

A commentor pointed to a Fast Company article on ING, and I found myself smiling. Would You Like a Mortgage With Your Mocha? describes the corporate headquarters of ING pretty well.

Instead of building its own office tower, it has chosen to invest in reinvigorating the area around Wilmington's run-down train station. This summer, part of the company will move into a renovated Pennsylvania Railroad building wedged between the train station and the Christina River. ING Direct has been working with the city to connect its new building to the station by closing a street and erecting a glass atrium full of shops, restaurants, and an ING Direct Café. The company is also advocating a redo of the train station itself.

The article is from a couple of years ago, and the headquarters has been built.

I used to walk past their buildings at least once a week or so, to get to a riverfront produce market (and lunch area), before I left Wilmington a month ago. I'm not an ING customer, but I love this company for what they've done to make this small section of town a bright vibrant place.

Take an area that's run down, and needs a little tender-loving-care and personal attention. Build on the strengths of that area, and find the human side of the relationship and strive to make it better. Show the bright and optimistic side of things.

That's what they did to the section of Wilmington, Delaware, that they entered. And it sounds like that's what they are trying to do to banking, too.

What Do You Do on An Elevator?

I really enjoyed Dirk Knemeyer's post on The Elevator Experience.

I recently left a job where I did have to ride on elevators everyday, where I had to sit in rush hour traffic, and where I paid for parking.

Now I work in a small town which is busier on weekends than it is during the working week. I'm not sure if there are any buildings in town that have an elevator. parking is free, and there seems to always be a spot to park in near work.

I've been hit with a bit of culture shock over the change. But I'm enjoying it. The little differences are magnified as I'm getting used to the change.

I suspect that I'm not alone. It's getting easier to work with others located around the globe without having to do it from a metropolis.

Don't miss those elevator rides, either.

Google May Appeal French Trademark Decision: Trademarks and Online Advertising

Where does trademark law fit in the age of the internet, and online advertising?

That's a question being asked in courts not only in the United States, but also in places like France and Germany.

While Google prevailed in a trademark case in Germany, they haven't been as successful in French courts.

A recent loss in France over the use of trademarks in Google advertising has the search company considering appealing the trademark decision.

I'm not sure how successful such an appeal would be, but it seems like something that the search engine giant needs to pursue.

The high court in central Paris awarded the damages in a decision late Friday and ordered Google to stop displaying advertisements for Vuitton's rivals whenever Internet users typed Vuitton's name or other trademarks into the search engine.

So, what is the status of the use of trademarks in targeted advertising through a program like Google's? I know that it's almost impossible to police the web for all trademarks registered on a mix of international, federal, and state levels. It has to be even more difficult to know which words might be trademarks by the exercise of common law, without registration anywhere.

Should it make a difference if a company possessing a trademark contacts a Search Engine that has been enabling someone to bid on that company's trademark, and asks them to stop?

Is the bidding on competitor's trademarks the type of thing that can cause consumer confusion, or dilute the trademark, or both?

Interestingly, the French ruling seems to have been followed on all of the Google sites, not just the French version. Searches on the main Google page no longer show advertisments for the trademark that had been targeted by advertisers of Google's ad program.

For other French cases that have been brought against Google's adwords program on trademark grounds, see:

Le Google France Blames the Americans

AXA Challenges Google's Business Model

Google loses trademark dispute in France

In American Courts, there are also at least a couple of pending cases against Google by trademark holders who don't want their trademarks used as targeted terms for advertising by the search engine. There was a recent ruling in a case brought by the insurance company Geico, which Google seems to have one.

But, that ruling was in one district court in the United States, and it's possible that a judge in another district could come up with a different ruling. I haven't heard much about the litigation between Google and American Blind, but that doesn't mean that the parties involved aren't watching the legal actions in France carefully.

One of the points raised in the latest French case, by the judge ruling over the matter was interesting. The court stressed that since Google's keyword suggestion tool was what offered the trademarked term to the advertisers, Google may have to revamp its suggestion tool.

Here's one of the items raised in another litigant's case, from the complaint in rescuecom's trademark suit against Google:

The so-called "Sponsored Links" do not always clearly identify themselves as advertisements, and Google's layout of the ads does not conspicuously identify them as such. This is particularly true of the Sponsored Links which appear at the top of the Search Results. These ads at the top of the Search Results are designed by Google to look like part of the "non-sponsored" Search Results, and by virtue of the fact that they appear at the top of the list of Search Results, Internet Users may infer that they are the most relevant websites on the Search Results page.

Is this the type of thing that makes a difference?

Maybe even more importantly, the rescuecom complaint also raises an issue involving Google's suggestion tool, and its suggestion that the trademarked name be used as a target of advertising:

Upon information and belief, defendant Google has used an online program called a "Keyword Suggestion Tool" to suggest to one or more of Rescuecom Corporation's competitors that they should use the Rescuecom trademark as a Keyword for their advertising. Google's suggestion is designed to make such competitors' advertising more successful, and therefore more profitable for Google, by intercepting and diverting customers and potential customers of Rescuecom Corporation to others.

I'm not sure that was an issue that was raised in the Google versus Geico matter. This seems to have made a difference to a French judge. Will it have the same impact upon an American one?

Now that the Butler has a Blog...

I'm going to have to make a list of all of the official search engine and directory blogs.

It's just too important in this age of Internet search and marketing to keep in touch with what the search engines are doing not to keep on eye on what they share in their blogs.

The newest is the Ask Jeeves Blog.

Welcome to the blogosphere, Jeeves.

Elusive Creativity

Dave Shea describes his methods for Getting Unstuck. The one about throwing a whole bunch of ideas upon a canvas is one I find works really well for me.

Speaking of creativity, there's a nice article on Asterisk titled Thinking Differently About Site Mapping and Navigation. As noted there, often a web site's home page isn't the first page that most visitors to a site experience. Usually, a search engine will deposit them in the middle of a site.

Having given more than a couple of powerpoint presentations, it's nice to learn that I've been missing out on one feature that can make using the program much more enjoyable. Michale Hyatt recently had a post on how he discovered the use of powerpoint's PowerPoint's Presenter's View. After reading it, I have an overwhelming desire to create a powerpoint presentation.

Cutting Through's Ten Ways to Use Blogs for Managing Projects pulls together some great ways to use a blog as a business tool. I'll agree that it is a pretty useful tool for teams. Blogger started as a project management tool for Pyra Lab's back in the early pre-Google days. Funny how their project management blogging tool ended up being their crowning achievement. I think there's a message regarding creativity in there somewhere.

Kathy Sierra is probably right. Sometimes being creative is only a matter of knowing when to articulate a difficult problem to a Rubber Duck. Being forced to explain a diffucult problem in simple words, outloud, can bring a solution with it. Seems a teddy bear might work just as well.

Someone at Metafilter recently pointed to a technical manual from NASA published in 1964, Clarity in Technical Writing (pdf), as a source of some good common sense writing about writing. There's some nice writing in those pages, and some very good ideas. I don't remember being so pleasantly surprised by a government document since I came across the SEC's A Plain English Handbook: How to Create Clear SEC Disclosure Documents. Like the NASA document, there are lots of common sense suggestions in those pages that have value beyond the writing of a disclosure statement.

Short Bits

Some good tips from the Christian Science Monitor: Seven steps to financial fitness. Common sense steps, yes, but a little common sense never hurt anyone.

An area that the web hasn't quite gotten to yet, but it's good to see someone thinking about it, is Web Design for All the Senses. Lots of other interesting ideas from Dirk Knemeyer here.

One thing I would like to see more of in 2005, is site owners getting a firmer grasp on how they can more tightly integrate User and Business Goals

I recently tested Microsoft's Beta Spyware program, and uninstalled it after a couple of days. A nice writeup of some of the reasons why can be found here: Free Microsoft Program To Battle Spyware Has Some Serious Flaws

I'm going to have to sit down over the next couple of days and try to figure out if I want to add Technorati Tags to this blog. They are another neat-looking feature that probably won't get incorporated into blogger. I'd be happy with trackback and categories. If anyone has the ear of someone at Google, please pass it along.

Speaking of Google, there's an article from Peter Norvig at Always On, titled Semantic Web Ontologies: What Works and What Doesn't. Peter Norvig is the Director of Search Quality at Google.

Growth Where There Shouldn't Be: Revel in the Unexpected

I really enjoyed Kirsten Osolind's post about an observation she made while visiting some clients, and noticing that some decorated branches left over from their Christmas celebrations had begun to bud, and show new life.

See: RE: Forcing Branches

If's funny that we can find such inspiration in such unlikely places, but we can. And the moments where we might feel drained of creativity, and uninspired, are times when creativity sometimes finds us - at least if we keep our eyes open.

Never shop on an Empty Stomach

I don't like going to the grocery store when it's crowded.

I discovered, during my college days, the joy of strolling through the supermarket in the later evening hours, and it's a habit that I'm not sure I want to break.

Sure, there's no one manning the Deli counter. And the salad bar has long been put out to rest for the day. If you catch it just right, there's a nice mist in the vegetable center, and the only dodging you have to do is around pallets used to restock shelves. Some of the necessities have been stripped clean from the shelves, and the baked goods are traveling on the downside from their morning freshness.

Usually, finding a parking place near the front doors isn't a challenge, but locating more than one cashier might be. It's a little easier to see the business behind the business when you walk through the tinned goods at night. When you skip an aisle because it's just been washed and waxed, you're reminded that a lot of people trample down those lanes everyday, and those footpaths get pretty messy.

Maybe it's the mess that I like. When I read an article like They have ways of making you spend, I'm reminded of the rough-hewn nature of my grocery at night, and the magic of the market doesn't seem as enchanting.

Though I do try to eat a snack before I drive to the store.

(via the BusinessPundit)

What changes would you make for 2005?

I purposefully didn't list a set of resolutions for 2005.

I think this year, I'm going to follow Jennifer Rice's suggestion in her blog post from a couple of days (and a year) ago, in her post, Let's be the change we want to see:

It's important to take a look at the relationships in your life, and to see how you can strengthen them. Make more time for family and friends if you haven't. Look up some people you haven't talked to in a while, and say hello. See if there's some way that you can reach out to your local community, and make a difference by being interested and involved. As Jennifer wrote:

If each of us chooses to take ownership of our small section of the vast social fabric that ties us all together -- to tighten it up and halt the unravelling, not just with technology but with our own authentic goodness -- our society can be irrevocably changed for the better.

That's a change that I think I'd like to see a lot of people adopt.

Selling Your Boss

Ever had one of those eureka moments, where all of the planets align, you can tell north from south absolutely without a compass, the stock market and racing track and health insurance forms all make complete sense, and Einstein's General theory of Relativity falls into place?

Or at least a new business idea makes such perfect sense to you that you wonder why you haven't been doing it all along. But you then face having to sell your company, or at least your boss on the idea.

I've been there, and it can be a tricky business.

Michael Hyatt, at Working Smart has a great set of guidelines on how to try to do just that. It's nice to see a well defined strategy for communicating new ideas like the one put together under the title: How to Sell Your Boss.

On the troubles with pricing

I recently had to get a certified copy of my birth certificate.

I was talking with my sister on the phone last night, and found out that she also needed to get a copy of her birth certificate, a couple of weeks back.

She drove an hour away, spent 2 hours waiting, and returned home with proof that she was born when and where she claimed. I spent fifteen minutes downloading a form, filling it out, and faxing it to the same office. Then fifteen minutes driving to the local Fed Ex office to pick my copy up the next night. I paid about $20.00 more. It was worth it.

It had me thinking a little about what we are willing to spend for goods and services, and what we consider value for our money and time.

An excellent post over at Joel on Software also considers those topics, but in the area of pricing software. See Camels and Rubber Duckies for an amusing way to look at how one might price software.

Take my advice, offered about 20 pages back: charge $0.05 for your software. Unless it does bug tracking, in which case the correct price is $30,000,000. Thank you for your time, and I apologize for leaving you even less able to price software than you were when you started reading this.

I'm not sure I agree with his conclusion, which I've quoted above. His essay is a thoughtful exploration of factors that one might consider in setting a price.

Not so Nasty Businesses

I really liked the list of companies that Johnnie Moore put together recently.

They are Brands... with a conscience?

Nice to see that there are companies which strive to set a good example, and act as responsible social entities.

I'm going to have to look for some more Not so Nasty Businesses in 2005. It sort of gives me a warm and fuzzy feeling to see some.

How do you measure success?

An article in the New Yorker about doctors, and the treatment of Cystic fibrosis is one of the best essays I've read in quite a while.

The Bell Curve looks at how doctors from two different hospitals treat the disease, and how they interact with their patients.

It also looks at how they learn from their efforts, and how they apply what they have learned.

(via Design Observer)

Welcome to the working blog

There's possibly some good to blogging about your work, and there's potentially some bad to it also: Looming pitfalls of work blogs

The companion BBC article involves a police office and an emergency medical technician, who explain why they blog about their jobs.

Business Blogs Interview

For 2005, I'm going to predict that many more businesses will adopt blogs in an effort to start conversations with their customers.

A lot of design firms, and online marketers have made that move, as have software manufacturers and search engines.

John S. Rhodes has a nice interview with Matthew Oliphant on the subject at Oristus: Blogs, Business and Some Usability.

Here are some reasons why I think that blogging might spread to more mainstream businesses:

• Content management tools that bloggers are using make publishing to the web much easier than having to create the html for new pages.


• People who have been testing the waters with personal sites may see the benefit of using blogs in their businesses


• Blogs allow businesses to bring timely news to their customers, and to share their views and reactions to changes in an industry

Is the world ready for more business blogs?

Reputation Management in Froogle's New Shopping Lists and Ratings

Google has added the ability to make and share a Froogle shopping list, and to rate sites found through Froogle.

It sounds a little like the ability to comment upon, and rate books, at Amazon.com. But the scope appears much larger - the commercial web as a whole. Or at least the commercial web as seen through Froogle.

It's an interesting approach for Google, which is branching out from its roots as a way to search the web.

Though, looking closely at those roots may show something else.

At a Presentation by Google's Larry Page last February, he had this to say about the intentions behind building Google:

"It wasn't that we intended to build a search engine. We built a ranking system to deal with annotations. We wanted to annotate the web--build a system so that after you'd viewed a page you could click and see what smart comments other people had about it. But how do you decide who gets to annotate Yahoo? We needed to figure out how to choose which annotations people should look at, which meant that we needed to figure out which other sites contained comments we should classify as authoritative. Hence PageRank.

"Only later did we realize that PageRank was much more useful for search than for annotation..."

Annotating the web. It's something that people blogging do. When Google purchased Blogger, a lot of people with blogs started pointing at how the acquisition would help Google to track and follow what bloggers felt was important on the web.

Maybe Google is using that information, and maybe they aren't. But the Froogle effort appears a lot more transparent, and seems like an approach to not only see what people think of a site, but also make it easy for others to share those comments. Is this reputation managment?

It's kind of interesting to slip back 6 years, and look at an old Jakob Nielsen article on Reputation Management. I don't know if we will ever arrive at the type of reputation management that he writes about, but I sort of feel that we might be a little closer if the Froogle rating system catches on:

The simplest reputation manager would compute the average rating for each information source, but more advanced services would use ideas from collaborative filtering and compute different ratings for different users. Basically, the reputation manager would find other users whose tastes are very similar to your own and give added weight to these users' ratings. Since the Web will have half a billion users in five years, it will always be possible to find other users who match your interests, no matter how obscure they are. Thus, the reputation manager can deal differently with people who love the Spice Girls and people who don't.

How popular will Froogle's rating system become? It's difficult to tell at this point, but if the popularity of Amazon's system is any sign, it might catch on in a big way.

If you have a commercial web site that sells products, you might want to spend a little time on Froogle's page for Froogle Merchants - Frequently Asked Questions, and spend the time to put together a Froogle Feed.

Academic Business Literature Search

As a fan of academic research, the Google Scholar program was great news.

There are lots of other search engines online for educational resources. For instance, SMEALSearch, which yielded some excellent results for a couple of searches I performed.

(Via searchenginewatch)

Google for Scholars

Information junkie that I am, the new Google Scholar is a dangerous thing.

Cite Seer has been keeping me up to my eyebrows in whitepapers. Adding the Google service on top of it will likely bury me in information.

Though, the first interesting looking paper that I located through Google Scholar was on Cite Seer. :)

Slogging Through Process Management

I've spent quite a lot of time over the past month looking through an extensive system of process managment and software certification developed by the Software Engineering Institute (SEI), a program hosted By Carnegie Mellon University, and sponsored by the U.S. Department of Defense.

Their Capability Maturity Model® Integration (CMMI) came up at a presentation I attended, and I wanted to find out more. I didn't suspect that there was so much, that I would fall into it, and almost completely disappear.

After trying to read a few thousand pages on the subject carefully, I'm to the point where I'm asking myself if I've learned anything. I probably have, but I think that it's going to take a while to digest. As least as long as I've taken so far. One aspect that I found pretty interesting was their application of their methodology to Commercial Off the Shelf software systems.

I'm also trying to understand how this type of process management could be useful to small and medium sized businesses, and businesses that aren't necessarily involved in the development of software. Many of the basic concepts are, such as reviewing processes, building upon them, and getting feedback from people not directly involved in projects.

A brief introduction (pdf) to the CMMI system gives a good overview, and this statement:

Studies have shown that companies that invest 5% to 10% of their operating costs into process improvement typically experience a return on investment of 100% the first year and upwards of 400% after 3 to 5 years. These returns on investments are based on reductions in the number of defects, faster time to market, improvements in estimation capabilities and better project control resulting in fewer schedule and cost overruns.

An article about the adoption of CMMI in India also provides some insight into its perceived value.

A presentation from the SEI back in March on the application of the CMMI system to small businesses gives some of the arguments for the adoption of the system by small to medium sized businesses, which they roughly define to be between 25 and 250 employees. It appears that they are looking into the feasibility of defining more of their processes in a manner in which these smaller businesses can take advantage of this type of process management.

I don't know if CMMI can be of benefit to organizations smaller than that. But some of the underlying ideas can be.