UK Catalog Sales Overtaken by Internet Orders

A study in the UK is reporting that more people are now ordering online than through mail order catalogs.

I sort of see that as good news, though it's not as optimistic for businesses as it might appear. While there has been growth on the web, there's been a larger dropoff of purchases from mail order.

Home shopping retailers must admit that the days of the big book are over and that the great hope of the home shopping industry is, or should be, the internet. The trouble with the mail order industry at the moment is that it tends to see the internet as a threat, where it should be seen as an opportunity.

There is something nice about having one of those big books of products in hand, and being able to leaf through the pages, and look at the different products. I used to love to do that with the old Edmonds Scientific catalogs, especially. The Whole Earth Review was a quirky, and interesting way to see offerings from a number of people.

Seems to me that there's room for both, and that using them together is a good approach for many businesses that are enjoying sales online.

Due Diligence for Small Business

Nice article from the Delaware Business Blog: Keep your Small Business Healthy by Improving Due Diligence.

Small businesses need to pay attention to all of the potential legal pitfalls that may face their businesses. The devil is in the details, and the details can be many. Especially make sure that you keep careful track of compliance with all of the small things that come up on a regular basis, such as quarterly estimated taxes, having a business license, etc.

If possible, define processes ahead of time to make these things easy to do. Talk to an accountant whom can help you plan ahead to make what could be chaotic into a matter of just following some simple steps and guidelines.

It's good to see the launch of the Delaware Business Blog. Welcome to the world of Business Blogging, Russell.

Microsoft Reinvents the Teddy Bear

Microsoft unveiled a new tool to aid in the parenting process - a Teddy bear that you can spy upon your toddler with.

Somewhere in a corporate boardroom, someone thought this was a good idea.

I'm going to assume that the people bringing this invention into the world, which allows for remote monitoring via a camera, and the sending and receiving of messages via microphones and speakers and a network connection, thought that this could help parents be in two places at the same time.

The bear was shown at a two day technology conference, as an attempt to show off the creativity of the corporate giant.

What Would Your Home Page Say?

Kim Krause asks the question, "what would your home page say if it could talk," and she gets an answer -- User Experience Web Design and Search Engines

Dear web site visitor.

I can't tell you how glad I am that you found my website. You have no idea the great lengths we?ve gone to get you here, let alone what we're about to do to keep you here...

A word of warning to web site owners, you might see a little of your web page in the answer.

Who is Your Audience: Using Personas to Focus Your Writing

I spent last week in New York City at a convention for internet marketers. It was an interesting experience, and I brought a lot of ideas away from it.

One of them involved the use of personas in developing the concept of a site. I've looked at these hypothetical audience members and what they might mean to the development of a site before. But, during a discussion on "Converting Visitors to Buyers," it struck me that personas could be just as useful for people who write sites that are purely informational in nature.

And that they might be useful for people who contribute to blogs.

So I poked around the web a little earlier tonight, and came across an excellent article on using personas to help writers of sites that focus upon providing news and stories and data and opinions to people. This one, Personas: Setting the Stage for Building Usable Information Sites, from Alison J. Head (with Kim Goodwin) described something close to what I was looking for.

On the drive home tonight, through purely unscientific means, I decided that four personas would probably be a good match for this site.

One would be fresh out of high school, possibly male, filled with the uncertain future of trying to face fending for himself, and possibly trying to start his own business - someday.

A second would be in the last year of college, looking at internships, graduate school, or other possibilities available to her, while at the same time trying to figure out how to pay back student loans.

A third would be a stay-at-home mother, trying to start an internet based business, learning about all of the things that one needs to know along the way, while caring for children, and being somewhat limited in what she can or can't do.

The fourth would be someone who had a successful career, and for one reason or another, left it and is trying to make it as a contractor or consultant. He's been divorced a couple of times, and also has some interests outside of work competing for his time and ability to focus solely upon his new chosen profession.

I'm going to attempt to flesh out these personas over the next few days and weeks, and link to them from the sidebar.

Once I've completed that task, I will attempt to focus my writings here to those four, and see if those fictional characters can benefit from what I write.

It might help knowing who it is that I'm writing for, when I publish these posts. Will it make a difference not focusing upon a general audience, but rather specific people with their own personalities and interests? It's worth trying.

Start Playing and Start Learning

What role will game playing have in the future of our education?

Possibly a large one.

That's a conclusion raised in Games that make leaders: top researchers on the rise of play in business and education, from the Wisconsin Technology Network.

A friend was talking about how the Army had distributed a game, for free, that seemed to be catching on with a lot of young users. So, this quote from the article wasn't that much of a surprise:

One of the biggest users of games as training tools is the U.S. Army, which released the free tactical game America's Army to boost its recruitment and has worked with commercial game companies on a variety of other titles.

One of the words I've been seeing lately in education and usability is "engageability." It is easier to teach someone when they are interested and actively engaged.

Seems that classrooms may have something to learn from a gaming industry that earns ore in sales these days than box office sales from Hollywood.

Have Passion in What You Do

I've been enjoying the posts over at Creating Passionate Users

For instance, a story about Creating Passionate Fans was a great illustration of the power of treating every moment as unique and interesting, and every chance to interact with someone an opportunity to make a lasting impression.

The right attitude can make all the difference.

A World of Music

Could the record industry in the US learn something about electronic distribution of music from the success that it seems to be bringing to singers and songs from other countries?

Interesting article here: Downloading Opens Doors to World Music

Songs that might never had a chance to have been heard on radio years ago, are finding listeners in the United States. Audiences are finding performers who wouldn't mind expanding their fan base.

And I, for one, am happy to hear it.

His Blog Cost Him His Job; His Blog Found Him a New One

Your blog can cost you your job.

OK, you've probably heard some stories about a blogger who was let go from a place of emploment, for things said or shown on their blogs.

Joe Gordon, the author of the The Woolamaloo Gazette experienced that first hand.

There has been more than one tale circulating across the internet of how someone has been fired, harassed, or reprimanded for blogging about work. boing boing came up with a list about a month ago of companies who "fired, threatened, disciplined, fined or not hired people because of their blog."

Here are some of the blogs that cost people their jobs, and posts that talk about the experience.:

Diary of a Flight Attendant: Queen of Sky Story Summary

eclecticism: Fifteen Minutes of Fame

Ninetininezeros: the official story, straight from the source

Dooce: Collecting Unemployment

The Sarcastic Journalist: Freedom of Speech

Troutgirl: Shitcanned

I just came across a list, which includes many of those bloggers above, and others who where fired for their blogs: Update 1: List of Fired Bloggers

In Joe Gordon's case, the experience seems to have had a Happy ending. Comic book chain Forbidden Planet has hired him. Because of his blog...

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.

Fun with Logos

Enjoyed this quite a lot: The Man Behind the FedEx Logo

I like the look of the Kmart and Sears logos, which are prominently displayed at the top of a Wharton article on a merger between the two companies. I'm not sure I can see them combining together into a strong brand - a little like the difficulty of pulling the companies together. (Yes, logos aren't brands. But it makes a nice metaphor in this instance.)

The Tivo Logo is fun. Tivo users may see lots of logos, as a new way of getting viewers to watch ads is revealed.

An article on Pantone, the color people, reveals how important color may be to a brand.

A Wiki in the Office

A comment from Wilson Ng of Reflections of a Business-Driven Life, about using a PDA to save ideas for blog posts, had me considering how other tools could be used around the office.

The word "Wiki" came up in a discussion today, and the thought of using a Wiki to share ideas across the office got some positive responses. If you aren't familiar with the word, and with the tool, then you've missed an interesting looking application.

The online Wikipedia has been in the news recently, citing as a useful tool for research. It's also been receiving some criticism as a questionable source of information.

It's not the tool itself that is at the heart of the controversy, but rather the open nature of its use in that wiki-based encyclopedia. Anyone can come along and edit an entry - and even bad information can make its way into the site.

An LLRX.com article from this past summer highlights some of the potential uses of the application. See: Enter the World of the "Wiki"

A wiki is fairly easy to use, and could allow people in a small or medium sized office to share information in a meaningful manner. I think it could effectively provide an opportunity to reduce interoffice emails, memos, and meetings to share knowledge.

I visited a site that allows folks to try out demo versions of different open source software (opensourceCMS.com), and tried out a wiki. The one I tested tonight was Media Wiki. There are a few others there, and I'm going to try those out, too.

Once I find a wiki that I like, I think that an inter-office blog might be the next step.

Thank you, Wilson. Your suggestion provided a catalyst, pulling together some other ideas in my mind for how to better manage some office communications.

Inspirational Writing about Writing

It's not always easy for me to write something here everyday. I had a nice post for last night most of the way written - in my head. Getting it on a page is another matter.

I should try harder. Sometimes life interrupts.

Regular updates are one of the things that Mark Bernstein points to in the excellent 10 Tips on Writing the Living Web. He notes that even fifteen minutes a day can add up to quite a few words over the course of a year.

His article has been around for a couple of years now, and I've seen it fuel more than one argument. Some of the points made seem to rub some people the wrong way.

But, I find it inspirational. The same is true of Rebecca Blood's essay weblogs: a history and perspective. Rebecca's words were one of the forces that started me blogging.

So I'm going to try to add some shorter posts on a daily basis, to go with some of the longer ones that I seem to be fond of lately.


And I'm going to try to write something everyday, even if I only have 15 minutes to do it.

The Misunderstood Lure of Page Rank

Google PageRank is one of the very classic credibility and authority indicators on the Web and also one of the most trusted and reliable ones.

Robin Good, from PACmeter - Popularity, Authority, Credibility Online: How To Measure Them

There are some very nice links in Robin Good's article, but he makes a mistake when he starts attributing credibility to page rank. I understand how people would possibly misunderstand, but I want to seriously caution anyone who thinks that they should use the measure of page rank on a Google toolbar as a measure of expertise or trustworthiness.


Page Rank, named after its inventor, Larry Page, is a method of calculating a value based upon the number of links to a URL, and the "popularity" of the pages linked from. It's a mathematical formula, and a patented method used to help the search engine determine which pages to return when someone performs a search for a site.

Here's how Google describes Page Rank:

PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important."

Rage Rank is one of around 100 or so different attributes that Google uses when it determines the order of listings that it returns when someone tries to find information using the search engines.

It is based upon the number of links to a site, but the intentions behind the links aren't considered. Those links could be purchased text advertisements. They could be from comment spam in blogs, and guest books, and wikis. They could be criticism, and their popularity is actually infamy.

Unfortunately, one of the failings of page rank is that the best page on a specific subject may exist on the web with few or no links to it, and because of that, the page won't come up on Google's search results for that subject.

A recent and excellent paper that looks at this problem with page rank is worth reading: Filthy Linking Rich And Getting Richer!, by Mike Grehan. The problem with page rank, according to Mike Grehan:

But this is also the creator of a very worrisome problem which affects new web pages with low linkage data, regardless of the quality of those pages. Quality and relevance are sometimes at odds with each other. And the ecology of the web may be suffering because of the way search engines are biased towards a page's popularity more than its quality. In short, "currently popular" pages are repeatedly being returned at the top of the results at the major search engines.

Page rank is a measure of popularity, and the amount of page rank that shows on the Google toolbar is an indication of that popularity. But it's not a measure of credibility, and never has been. And sites with lower page ranks may be of better quality, and of higher credibility than pages with higher page ranks.

To use page rank as a substitute for much better ways of determining credibility is a mistake. It's alluring to think that such a shortcut exists, but it doesn't.

Robin Good also points towards the Alexa toolbar as another measure of credibility. Again, it's a questionable assumption. The Alexa results are like an unscientific poll where the people being polled select themselves. The numbers Alexa uses are supposed to indicate the amount of traffic to web sites based upon the travels of people with Alexa toolbars installed on their browsers. I understand that a number of web sites in South Korea are pretty popular according to Alexa. I also understand that a lot of people in South Korea use the Alexa toolbar.

I think that my analogy of Alexa being like an internet poll where the participants aren't selected by the polling body is accurate. There's a nice set of questions, from the National Council on Public Polls, that you should ask and that a journalist should be aware of before trusting the credibility of a poll. These are 20 Questions A Journalist Should Ask About Poll Results. Here's a snippet from the analysis under the question that asks, "How were these people chosen":

The key reason that some polls reflect public opinion accurately and other polls are unscientific junk is how people were chosen to be interviewed. In scientific polls, the pollster uses a specific statistical method for picking respondents. In unscientific polls, the person picks himself to participate.

It's tempting to try to find a shortcut to determine the credibility of a web site. A toolbar is no substitute for an intelligent and informed decision.

Attitude in the Making

When I was in Boston a few weeks back, I couldn't resist the temptation to stop in at least one used books store.

I entered into Commonwealth Books on Boylston Street, which overlooks Boston Commons. They had a tremendous selection of dusty old volumes. If you're a book lover, it's a great place to stop.

I ended up getting a rather new book - Abstracting Craft; The Practiced Digital Hand - about the transformation of computers from tools to help create artwork to a medium for art itself. What I found fascinating about it was the concepts it describes on how people interact with computers.

My reading list is shrinking, and it's moving its way towards the top. So, I can't provide any type of review of the book right now. But, I wanted to share the introductory quote from the book, which I thought was a good one:

The true workman must put his individualized intelligence and enthusiasm into the goods which he fashions. He must have a natural attitude for his work so strong that no education can force him away from his special bent. He must be allowed to think of what he is doing, and to vary his work as the circumstances of it vary, and his own moods. He must forever be stirring to make the piece at which he is at work better than the last. He must refuse at anybody's bidding to turn out -- I won't say a bad -- but even an indifferent piece of work, whatever the public wants, or thinks it wants.

-- William Morris

A friend, on writing advice to another, on the difficulties of starting out in business noted that attitude was one of the most important elements of success. The type of attitude that Morris writes about above. A confidence, a faith in yourself that no matter what obstacles, or what shortcomings may face you, that you continue to move forward.

When I wrote about the value of mistakes a couple of days ago, one of the things I took for granted in the writing was that most people get up from a fall, brush themselves off, and begin again. But a lot of people don't.

The attitude to fashion something better than you've made before is related to the attitude to rise above problems, and your own mistakes.

How do you develop that attitude? Like most things. One step at a time.

The Value of Making Mistakes

Chances are, as a business owner, you're going to make a mistake or two.

It happens, and you may not even know that you've committed some type of blunder. But, upon reflection, you may realize that you could have done something differently.

It pays to review upon your business activities on a regular basis - to set aside some time to refine processes, or consider how you interact with clients. Learning from your mistakes, and learning how to not make the same mistake again is part of a successful business strategy.

I was looking through some old books at a neighborhood antique shop and found an old volume on Benjamin Franklin. I've been working on putting together some pages on my personal site about Dr. Franklin, so I purchased it. As I was leafing through the book, I came across a story by the good doctor that I thought might be worth sharing here. It's a story that he wrote for his nephew, titled The Whistle

When I was a child of seven years old, my friends, on a holiday, filled my pocket with coppers. I went directly to a shop where they sold toys for children; and being charmed with the sound of a whistle, that I met by the way in the hands of another boy, I voluntarily offered and gave all my money for one.

I then came home, and went whistling all over the house, much pleased with my whistle, but disturbing all the family. My brothers, and sisters, and cousins, understanding the bargain I had made, told me I had given four times as much for it as it was worth; put me in mind what good things I might have bought with the rest of the money; and laughed at me so much for my folly, that I cried with vexation; and the reflection gave me more chagrin than the whistle gave me pleasure.

This, however, was afterwards of use to me, the impression continuing on my mind; so that often, when I was tempted to buy some unnecessary thing, I said to myself, Don't give too much for the whistle; and I saved my money.

As I grew up, came into the world, and observed the actions of men, I thought I met with many, very many, who gave too much for the whistle.

When I saw any one too ambitious of court favor, sacrificing his time in attendance on levees, his repose, his liberty, his virtue, and perhaps his friends, to attain it, I have said to myself, This man gives too much for his whistle.

When I saw another fond of popularity, constantly employing himself in political bustles, neglecting his own affairs, and ruining them by that neglect, He pays, indeed, said I, too much for his whistle.

If I knew a miser, who gave up every kind of comfortable living, all the pleasure of doing good to others, all the esteem of his fellow-citizens, and the joys of benevolent friendship, for the sake of accumulating wealth, Poor man, said I, you do indeed pay too much for your whistle.

When I met with a man of pleasure, sacrificing every laudable improvement of the mind, or of his fortune, to mere corporeal sensations, and ruining his health in their pursuit, Mistaken man, said I, you are providing pain for yourself, instead of pleasure; you give too much for your whistle.

If I see one fond of of fine clothes, fine furniture, fine equipages, all above his fortune, for which he contracts debts, and ends his career in a prison, Alas! says I, he has paid dear, very dear, for his whistle.

When I see a beautiful sweet-tempered girl married to an illnatured brute of a husband, What a pity it is, say I, that she should pay so much for a whistle!

In short, I conceive that great part of the miseries of mankind are brought upon them by the false estimates they have made of the value of things, and by their giving too much for their whistles.

The cost of that whistle was much higher than it should have been, but the value in understanding the mistake made was priceless.

I'm also a believer that it's possible to learn from the mistakes of others, and I'm looking forward to reading the rest of the words of Benjamin Franklin. His words to his nephew provide a lesson to all of us if we want to take it.

There is value in understanding when you make a mistake, or in considering the mistakes of others, when you learn from them, and can take steps to avoid them.

How do you do that?

• Understand that the potential exists for making a mistake, and consider setting up processes in your undertakings that help you avoid mistakes.



• Take notes when you make business decisions, explaining the reasons for those decisions, and review them on a regular basis.



• Write those notes in a manner that is easy for you to do, and in a way that is easy to review.



• Make sure that your communications with your customers includes noting whatever criticisms they might have, and solicit their feedback to see what they liked and disliked about your services or products.



• When you finish a project, make a list of lessons learned - understand the reasons for your successes and your failures, and figure out how to build upon the successes, and how to avoid the failures.



• If you work as part of a team, work together to come up with that list of reasons for success or failure, and enable each other to build a future of more effective cooperation.

The value of making a mistake is in what you do after you realize you've made one, and in learning to take proactive steps to avoid making more.

Of Search Engines and Usability

Friend, mentor, co-conspirator Kim Krause has a new article out on web site usability that describes the impact of designing a site with your visitors in mind.

It's called Do Not Drop Your Web Site Off the Search Engine Cliff. If you own a commercial web site, it's a good introduction on how to look through a usability perspective to help your efforts to get your site noticed.

How Much Information Should You Provide to Your Web Site's Customers?

When someone arrives at your web site, how much information do they see about your business, your industry, and your services?

If you provide marketing or consulting services, how much do you share of the "why to do something" instead of just the "how?"

One of the topics covered in the interview I recently participated in involved the topics of expertise and trustworthiness.

I'm of the opinion that sharing information can not only help customers make reasonable decisions based upon being fully informed, but also allows enables them to gauge how trustworthy you are, and how much expertise you possess.

My friend and Co-moderator at Cre8asite Forums, Barry Welford, has a post in response to the interview, and to the notion of sharing information on a services based web site.

I especially agree with him on this point:

If an Internet marketing consultant is good, he or she will tell you the tough stuff that your own employees may not have the guts to comment on.

Of course, when they are faced with a similar situation in the future, they aren't going to need your services to help them solve it. They now understand how and why they should on their own. But when something new comes along, there's a good chance that your phone number or email address is the first one they will pick out when deciding that they need help.

If you enable your clients to make informed decisions, they will come back to you when they need to make more.

**********

I also want to add a shoutout and thanks to the folks at Cre8site Forums who gave me such a positive response to the interview. Thank you all.

Questions and Answers with Lip-Sticking's Yvonne Divita

I recently had the honor and pleasure of being interviewed by Yvonne Divita as part of her Smart Man Online series. The exchange was published today.

She asked some pretty insightful questions, and made me work hard to come up with some answers that would live up to the standards of her daily posts. The topics included online credibility, usability, blogging tools, online shopping, taglines, and privacy policies.

I really enjoy the perspective she brings to topics, and spending some time at her Lip Sticking makes me think about business, and marketing, in ways that I otherwise might not have.

As Yvonne often says at the end of her posts, "What's not to like about that?"

The Blog in the China Shop?

Somehow I missed the long, four part paper Blogging the Market, published last January on Internet Changes Everything.

I've only had a chance to skim through the four pages of the article, but it seemed filled with some interesting ideas, and worth sharing. And so I have.

Here's a small peek at the abstract that kicks the whole thing off:

Within the boundaries of the firm though, the implementation of weblogs takes a whole new dimension to realising that weblogs are more than the sum of its parts: more than vibrant public forums and frequently updated streams-of-consciousness, alternative forms of publishing and online outbursts of gonzo journalism, and personal diaries. They are the embodiment of online self-organising social systems, are essentially characterised by management decentralisation and ultimately threaten to destabilise current organisational structures and re-invent the scope of management.

It's long. I saw pieces of prose that I think I agree with, and parts of arguments that I wasn't so sure about. But it looks like it might be worth scribbing some notes on as I work through. Maybe more on this one when I have a couple of hours to spend on it.

Establishing Credibility on the Web

How do you know which sources to trust online?

How confident do you feel about purchasing from a web site?

When people tell me that they get a lot of visitors to their web sites, but not many purchasers of their goods or services, there are often at least four potential sets of issues that I raise:

• Are the people finding your site the audience that you intended to target?


• Are the products being presented in a way that entices people to purchase?


• How comfortable are people in conducting business with your site?


• How easy or difficult is it for people to complete a transaction? Are there roadblocks to sales based upon the way the purchasing transaction is presented?

I want to discuss the third item on that list a little in this post.

One place I often point people towards, when this is a problem are the pages from Stanford University on The Web Credibility Project. They have a pretty good set of guidelines linked to from that page on how to make a site appear more credible.

It includes such items as verifiable testimonials, contact information on every page, listed membership in industry and consumer organizations, and many others.

There's also a number of great reports on the site that describe how the visual design of a site can help establish credibility. How credible a site can appear does depend upon correct spelling, well-written text, professional looking graphics, the presence of links to privacy policies, copyright notices, and many more things that we often take for granted when they are done right, but notice immediately when done wrong.

Lately, I've been getting a number of emails from scam artists on what have become known as phishing expeditions.

Here's an example of one I received recently:

Dear Customer,


This email was sent by the Citibank server to verify your E-mail
address. You must complete this process by clicking on the link
below and entering in the small window your Citibank Debit
Card number and PIN that you use on ATM.


This is done for your protection - because some of our members
no longer have access to their email addresses and we must
verify it.


To verify your E-mail address and access your bank account,
click on the link below:

[url removed]


---------------------------------------

Thank you for being our customer

---------------------------------------

The URL that appeared in the email seemed to go to a citibank address online, but really didn't. I have a citibank account, but I've never given them an email address, and haven't set up online access with them. If I had, this might seem somewhat reasonable. But, even citibank wouldn't ask for my PIN number.

I've received similar emails that appeared to come from Suntrust Bank and from Paypal. They didn't. But they seemed realistic.

Scams like these make credibility and trust things that are even more difficult for a web site owner to earn from potential customers.

While I've been suggesting that people look over the Stanford Reports, I decided that it wasn't a bad idea to look at see what some others are doing to earn confidence and credibility online.

Well, one is the use of real names. As Simon Willison noted a couple of months back in a post titled Improving online credibility, the use of a real name by a member in a forum or online message board can boost the credibility of that person. He notes that Amazon.com is encouraging people to use their real names in product reviews, and posting badges next to the names of people who do, so that they might be perceived as more credible by people who read those reviews.

One of the best ways to build confidence as a web site owner providing goods or services is to encourage people to contact you. I like putting contact information on every page of a business site. A good place for it is at the bottom of pages.

That's not only an email address, but also a phone number and a mailing address. On the front page of a site, it oftn makes sense to put that contact information above the fold - in a place where people will see it as they scan the page for the first time. Some other good suggestions are in this Site Point article - The Lost Art of Conversation - Encouraging Contact Online

I mentioned in the last paragraph that a quick scan of a homepage is an important time for someone to see information like an address. Well, it helps for people to see even more there:

• A link to a privacy policy is essential. It tells people what you will do with their contact information if they do contact you.



• Information about the business needs to be front and center. It doesn't need to be as detailed as an "About us" page would be, but it needs to be enough so that people might be interested in reading that "About us" page.



• People need to know other information about your goods or services, such as shipping policies, or return policies. If you don't include information about those, it's probably much more reasonable for people to shop for the same products or services offline. At least that way they can get in the face of people who sold them something that didn't work as advertised.



• I like to know that there's a human being behind a web site. A statement that appears to be written by that person, and a photograph can increase my confidence in a site. An email address for that person, presented in a way that makes me feel comfortable in contacting them boosts my confidence even more.



• If the business is a member of a consumer organization, like the Better Business Bureau, or a member of an industry association, and I can check with those organizations, it's another means of improving my trust in the honesty of their site's promises to me.



• Promises? Yes, a company online makes promises to its customers. And it keeps those promises. When Dell tells me that they will ship a computer I've ordered within ten days, it better arrive within ten days. The last few we ordered from them arrived in three or four days. They made a reasonable promise, and they overdelivered. It's a practice that had us going back for more.



• More promises? When you make a statement involving the price, quality, uniqueness, or other aspect of your goods or services, I'll probably check around to see if there have been any complaints. Usenet, through Google Groups, is a great place to find information about a business - especially if there are complaints. The point though, is not to avoid making promises. The point is to keep the promises that you do make.

There are other ways to display your credibility online. I'll explore some of those later this week. If anyone has any other suggestions about credibility, I'd love to hear them.

There's Always Room for Good News (Blog)

I'm adding the Good News Blog to the links at the right.

Not because I know the author, though I do.

Not because he's bright, articulate, and cheerful; even though he is all of those things.

But rather because we come across so much news everyday filled with sadness, strife, and loss. It's good to know that there's at least one place to get good news.

When Do You Teach Your Childen About Money?

I remember the look on my father's face the first time I pulled out a credit card.

I guess it was a rite of passage for him. He asked me if he had "signed for it." I was probably about twenty or so, and he shouldn't have been that surprised. In many ways, he had prepared me for the world of credit, taxes, financing agreements, loans, and so on.

But I could tell that it surprised him.

My brother and sister and I had savings accounts as long as I can remember. I think my parents put some seed money in our accounts to make us feel good about collecting, but we were expected to deposit some of our allowance into our bank accounts on a regular basis. It was a way of investing in ourselves and giving us something to plan ahead for.

There's a memory of my father sitting down with me, and having me carefully read the instructions for my first income tax payment. He showed me where to enter what, and how to look up how much I owed, or how much I would get back. After that first time, I was on my own. I've done my taxes for myself ever since.

I believe that in there somewhere we even worked out a budget. I don't recall how old I was, but it made a lot of sense when we did it, and the exercise has helped me ever since.

But I don't remember really talking about finances in school, except maybe when it came to counting out lunch money.

A Wharton article, Teaching Kids about Money: Why It's Not Just Fun and Games takes a look at making financial literacy something taught in classes. It opens with this quote:

"Improving basic financial education at the elementary and secondary school level is essential to providing a foundation for financial literacy that can prevent younger people from making poor financial decisions that can take years to overcome." Alan Greenspan, chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, 2001

But that type of practical application seems to be something schools often leave to parents. A couple of pages I found on teaching children about money are these two:

Teaching children about money

A snippet:

Tips for teaching children about money. Younger children may believe that parents have an unlimited supply of money, unaware that checks and credit cards are not the same as cash and that bills must be paid.

Another one that does a nice job of explaining the advantages and disadvantages of the dole system and the allowance system: Teaching Your Children About Money

A good time to consider giving your child money is when he or she is between the ages of five and eight. Most parents use the Dole System or the Allowance System, and both have advantages and disadvantages. Research shows that in some instances an allowance may cost less than simply giving or doling money out for specific needs and wants.

A Good Reason for Headlines

A study from the Poynter Institute had some interesting observations when they studied what people look on web pages while wearing eyetracking equipment.

The project, Eyetrack III, may or may not have implications for your web site.

One quote I thought was very interesting:

Smaller type encourages focused viewing behavior (that is, reading the words), while larger type promotes lighter scanning. In general, our testing found that people spent more time focused on small type than large type. Larger type resulted in more scanning of the page -- fewer words overall were fixated on -- as people looked around for words or phrases that captured their attention

My favorite page in the study was one that compared the styles of five different web sites.

So you Want to Volunteer With a NonProfit

There are a lot of reasons to get involved with a nonprofit organization.

One reason may be because you have some free time, and want to find a way to spend it in a productive manner. There are many organizations that could use a hand, and many opportunities looking for people to fill them. A group like Volunteer Match can help you find an internship, or post as an educator, mentor, or other position.

The range of choices may surprise you. A search in my area revealed a need for a person to help with Special Olympics, a music/choral group leader, a court appointed special advocate, a database application developer for a museum, a museum guide, a humane cat trapper, a dog walker, a literacy volunteer teaching adults, a park ranger intern, a member of a historic sewing group, and many more.

Another reason may be because you have nothing else to do. I remember when a friend had left his job, and was wandering directionless. I saw a sign for a group that was rescuing and rehabilitating wild birds nearby, and convinced him that it might be something fun to do, and that I would join with him. He got involved with them, and spent some serious time helping to do construction jobs around their facilities, care for sick and injured birds, and travel to places near and far to help rescue birds from oil spills. He met his future wife while volunteering there. It seemed in some ways that the opportunity helped rescue him.

A different reason might be that you have no choice. Well, you do have a choice, but helping others may just be the thing that helps you. An ex-neighbor knocked on my door a couple of months back. He asked me for some advice with the legal system. He had been caught driving without a license -- for the third time. His court date was in about a month. It's a charge that often carries with it some prison time. He asked me what he should do. I told him that the best thing he could do was to go to some place like the Boys club, or somewhere else, and volunteer. Find something that a judge could look at and say to him or herself that "here is someone who is trying to do something for someone else. Someone who just might have seen the errors of his ways." I didn't want to get all preachy, and I could tell by the incredulous look on his face that it wasn't the advice that he expected.

I don't know if he took my advice. I hope that he did.

If you do consider volunteering, there are some things that you should keep in mind. I came across an excellent online resource that's worth a good look if you're inclined to get involved. The Volunteer Legal Handbook - 7th Edition looks at some of the possible problems and risks you might take as a volunteer. Here are a couple of examples that they describe :

• The auto accident. You volunteer to drive a group of little league baseball players to a baseball game. You are involved in an auto accident and some of your little league passengers are hurt. Are you liable for their injuries? If so, will your insurance cover the claim?



• The fired volunteer. You are an unpaid supervisor of a group of volunteers. One of the volunteers has failed to perform adequately, and you have terminated his volunteer status with the organization. Now the former volunteer has sued you and the organization for slander, libel and wrongful dismissal. Are you liable?

I'm going to take another look at that Volunteer Match site. There are a couple of really nice museums nearby that looked like they needed guides. It could be fun.

short bits

Some links that I read on the web recently which I found interesting:

• It's Not Just Usability
• Why I don't recommend Firefox
• Microsoft Patents Tabbing through a web page
• Windows for Warships
• Creativity Techniques
• The Age of the Essay
• HTML Overlays
• Can social tagging overcome barriers to content classification?
• Making Stone Soup
• Information Architecture Research

blogging businesses

Why should your business have a blog?

I was hard pressed to come up with any better reasons than the ones listed in Lip-Sticking: 5 Reasons Jane Thinks Every Small Business Should Blog. If you have a business, and you don't have a blog, I'd recommend that you pay her site a visit.

As Yvonne Divita states, it's about improving communication with your customers. A blog can be very easy to set up, and if you like writing, can be a great way to get online quickly and easily.

I'll add to her other points that it can be fairly inexpensive to set up a blog.

Learn While You Surf

I'm often amazed at how much I learn while I'm online.

An article in today's local paper noted that the City of Philadelphia is considering taking on the costs of setting up the whole City for wireless connections to the web, at low or no cost for residents and visitors to the city.

One of the justifications for the move is that it would be much cheaper to do that than it would be to build a small library, and many more people would benefit from the access.

I think it's a great idea.

But how beneficial is web access? How much of a difference will it make to peoples' lives if they can just surf the web where ever they will? When ever they want?

A post over at DonnaM's blog looks at going online and 'Wasting' time looking for information. I've come to the same conclusion as Donna.

When I go online looking for the answer to a specific question, I don't always find the answer. But most of the time, I do learn something useful.

Apologies to Google and Blogger

I owe Google and Blogger an apology.

Last week, I applied to participate in Google's AdSense, after reading an article on the Blogger webpage titled There's an AdSense in my Blog.

To my surprise, I was turned down. I didn't expect that after reading Biz Stone's AdSense article. I sent Biz Stone an email, and I sent another to the AdSense team expressing my confusion and my dissatisfaction. I even made a blog post here: Google Hate Me

A DNS propagation problem kept me from getting emails at the beginning of this week, and I went through 72 hours or so without any emails. (Serious withdrawal there!) As I was sorting through my accumulated mails yesterday afternoon, there were a couple from the AdSense team.

One of them was a note informing me that I had submitted the wrong URL (".net" instead of ".com") and that they visited my blog, and figured out what had happened. The other was an email accepting me into the AdSense program.

It's my fault. I wish they had included the URL I submitted when they sent me the rejection. But regardless, I should have given them the right address.

It does appear that someone other that Google and Blogger own blogspot.net, and it's for sale. It does have a redirect going on to another site. I can understand why they would have sent a rejection notice.

Thanks AdSense team, for following up.

Inline Ads at Forbes

Since I've been paying a fair amount of attention lately to advertisements on web sites, a Whitespace article discussing Forbes' use of Ad Links In Content sort of stood out for me.

A good question, too. Should this type of ad be linked to differently than other ads in an online article.

I hope that this practice is abandoned. And quickly.

Two-Year Anniversary of Cre8asite Forums

It gives me a lot of pleasure to announce that we are celebrating the second anniversary of Cre8asite Forums. See: Cre8asiteForums Breaks Out the Champagne for its Two-Year Anniversary

Seeing Cliches

Fun site, well worth a visit, A Primer of Visual Cliche shows images that we see in many places, and how they are used over and over. And they are accompanied by some pretty insightful language:

Advertisers seemed to think we gape with astonishment, collapse with hysterical laughter when faced with twins - be it shampoo or spark plugs.

Harvesting Solar Hydrogen

Good news on the scientific front from the land down under.

Research at The University of New South Wales is underway to bring us a breakthrough in energy that is amazing. Will we see Solar hydrogen being the way people start supplying their energy needs within the next seven years?

Using special titanium oxide ceramics that harvest sunlight and split water to produce hydrogen fuel, the researchers say it will then be a simple engineering exercise to make an energy-harvesting device with no moving parts and emitting no greenhouse gases or pollutants.

This is a technology to keep an eye upon. What does it mean to the giant energy producing companies, to the Middle East with their reserves of fuel? What political and economic forces will be ignited if this energy system starts being implemented?

Sell Side Advertising, Part II

Seems like this is an idea that's going quickly around the web. Joi Ito wants to b e in the middle of the creation of a Sell side advertising system.

The thought of a pool of ads, that bloggers could choose and use, is the next step beyond an ad sense system.

What would it take to set a system like this up? I suspect that some affiliate tracking software could be tweaked to do quite nicely.

Trackback in Your Blogger Blog?

There was a great suggestion by a member of the Cre8asite Forums that I'd like to share.

One of the things I've wished for in my Blogger-based blog was a track-back like the folks at Movable Type blogs have.

I never noticed the wish/suggestions part of the feedback form that Blogger titles Blogger: Talk To Us.

If you use blogger, and you're wishing you had trackback, it's more likely to happen if you ask for it from the people who can give it to you - Blogger.

Pick Your Own Ads

Imagine that you decided to try to make some money on your web site by running some ads.

So, you go to a page where ads are available to be chosen, and used, and you pick out three or four that are appropriate to your site.

You check to make sure that your site is appropriate for the uses envisioned by the advertiser, and if it is, you cut and paste the code for those ads into a text editing program, and then into the template for your blog, or the html for your static web site.

The ad runs until the owner's cash reserve is emptied - then the ad disappears.

This is more work than something offered by some text-ad programs, but owners of sites get to choose the ads that run on their sites. There's a lot of value to that.

Will we ever see this model of advertising? I hope so. It's described in more detail on John Battelle's Searchblog: Sell Side Advertising: A New Model?

There's a lot of value to being able to choose your business partners. It's always possible to find them on your own, but not really easy. Unfortunately, most systems for showing ads are accompanied by adhesion contracts where the large company supplying the ads have all the power, and all of the say, and the people displaying the ads have no ability to negotiate.

I've had troubles with automated, contextual ads from one of the large online booksellers showing products from competitors. (Fortunately, you could choose which books to display from them rather than just use the contextual system.) I'd once signed up with a large reseller of hosting and domain services to act as an affiliate, only to get so disgusted by their practices that I yanked all links to them, and never contacted them ever again.

It would be great if someone set up an advertising clearinghouse where people could select the ads they wanted to show quickly and easily.

Google Hate Me

[There's an update to this post titled: Apologies to Google and Blogger It was an error on my part that caused this misunderstanding between the Google AdSense team and me.]

Excited is what I was, by the Biz Stone article There's AdSense in My Blog.

Actually, there was Adsense in my blog since the day Google bought Blogger, and put it in the header at the top of my blog. I have been AdSense free ever since last week, when those ads were replaced with a Blogger Nav Bar.

And then there was this Biz Stone article.

I've sent an email to Biz asking him to remove his article on ad sense from the Blogger Knowledge base. Biz does work for the company that claimed in its IPO filing with the SEC that they follow the credo "Do No Evil." Still I don't know if they would be happy if he removed the article. I wouldn't want him to take the food off the table of his children for doing the right thing. But I suspect that I'm not the only one being treated badly by Google.

I guess that Google hates this site. Or they do now. I don't blame them. It's typical of a lot of blogs. I suspect it doesn't get as many visits as Biz Stone, Genius which displays AdSense ads, even though he says at the bottom of the blog, "The thoughts and ideas expressed here are mine and mine alone. Not those of my employer."

And frankly, Biz has a lot more "my cat's breath smells like catfood" posts than I do.

Mark Pilgrim's wonderful blog, Dive into Mark explains the difference between a corporate blog and a personal blog, telling us:

So, I have a corporate blog now, in addition to "dive into mark," which will remain a personal blog. A corporate blog is like a personal blog, except you don't get to use the word "motherfucker."

I never use those types of words here. It's not because this is a personal blog, or a corporate blog, but rather because I think that type of language is a tired cliche.

As excited as I was to read Biz Stone's article, I was even more excited when I received the response from Google fairly quickly after I followed the link in Mr. Stone's article to Google's sign-on for adsense. After reading what I now take for fiction in the Biz Stone article, I figured that my adsense ads would return, but this time I would get paid for click-throughs on them.

I imagine that I haven't made much money for Google over the last year or so. But, I had these visions of writing long, beautiful essays here to attract large audiences, and massive amounts of clickthroughs - you know, like the daydreams you have when you pretend you've won the $100 million jackpot in the lottery.

While that seems like a silly pipe dream, I suspect that between blog posts and forum posts, I've probably written around 500,000 words on the web over the past couple of years.

But my site is a personal site. And I use blogger software to publish it - blogger. Oddly, that seems to be one of the reasons why my site was denied. I'm not sure. I don't quite understand this reason:

Client-side software use: A site or third party cannot display our ads as a result of the actions of any software application such as a toolbar. We may not accept sites that are associated with some types of client-side software or offer these types of client-side software.

The other reason was insulting, and infuriating:

Page type: Your website is a type of website that we do not currently accept into our program. Such websites include, but are not limited to, chat sites, personal pages, search engines, sites that contain predominately copyrighted material, and sites that drive traffic through cybersquatting.

I'm not sure if I'm being accused of having a personal site, but it's less personal that that of Biz Stone, Genius. It's not a chat site, or a search engine.

I'm not a cybersquatter. At least not intentionally. For one thing, the domain is "blogspot" which belongs to Google, so if anyone is cybersquatting here, under the ICANN definition, it would be the holder of the domain name.

But, I'll look at the subdomain, too. There were some trademarks with the word "nasty" in them at the US Patent and Trademark Office, such as these:

• NASTY BEAST
• TERRIBLE NASTY SCARIES
• MCNASTY TIKI PARTY
• NASTY GIRL
• NASTY SANTA
• TOO CUTE TO BE NASTY
• THE BIG NASTY
• THE NASTY POETS
• NASTY BOYS & THE WILD THANGS

Actually, there were 131 trademarks listed which included the word "nasty." I can only imagine what services or goods some of them protected. Not a single one of those is "nastybit" or "a Nasty bit of business". Now I know that I would likely have to look at state trademark databases and common law trademarks and first use in commerce, if anyone is even using those phrases in commerce. But, to the best of my knowledge, I have a good faith belief that there is no one I am depriving of their livelihood nor harming anyone's good will by using this domain name.

So, it's either that I have a "personal" site, or the site contains "predominately copyrighted material." I confess. This site contains predominately copyrighted material.

As soon as I write it, and publish it, it is copyrighted. All of it.

If I use a quote here, I try to limit my use of other's materials to fair use. I suspect that Google means someone else's copyrighted material. So, I'm either being accused of being a thief or writing a personal site.

I'm ready to use the types of words Mark Pilgrim mentioned above after being told that.

Funny that there was no problem last week displaying Ad Sense ads on these pages.

I asked for an apology after being told this. It's never a good customer service approach to accuse your customers of theft or cybersquatting or writing personal web pages.

I was told that I would be violating the terms of use of the Google Ad Sense program if I repeated any of the correspondence between Google and myself in public.

What I remember of my first year of law school contracts class is that there needs to be offer and acceptance to have a valid contract. There is no acceptance, so there is no contract.

I also picked through the boilerplate on the adsense contract page they pointed to, and tried to find out where it said that I couldn't talk about a conversation that I was a party to. I did not agree to that contract.

I never agreed to the Adsense ads on the blog when Google took over.

Granted, Google has a right to choose whichever sites they want to when they want to advertise. Honestly, I would have been happy with a "your site doesn't do enough traffic" or something similar. But, to call me a content thief, or a cybersquatter, and to make legal threats in my direction doesn't fit the method of operation of a company that swears to "do no evil."

If this site disappears, I may have to find some new blogging software, and a new place to blog.

I liked google, and I liked blogger.

What does it take to be a team?

An article on Darwin magazine brushes the surface of how to build a team, and how to help a team that has experienced problems. Help for Team Efforts is a good first look at teamwork, and telltale signs of when things are going right, and when they are going wrong.

One thing I've noticed about building a team is that it's something you have to work upon regularly. If you give your team tasks to perform on a regular basis, they start to develop a sense of how to work together. And a good team can accomplish a lot more than the combination of the efforts of individuals.

New Navbar

Courtesy of Douglas Bowman, it seems that us Blogspot hosted bloggers have a new navigation bar instead of ads at the top of our pages.

I like the last few changes made by Google's bloggger - the navbar, the profile, the newest templates, the newer writing interface.

I've been thinking about consolidating some of my blogging efforts because I've spread myself pretty thin. I don't know if I will.

But the tools that blogger has been adding make it harder to let this one go. Maybe I'll try to breathe some life into it again, and see if I can get it going.

Sliding in on an IceRocket

I don't know if there's really anything that new to the Mark Cuban backed search engine IceRocket, but it's kind of interesting hearing his take on it and reading through the many comments that it generated.

It's good to see people trying to wrest Google's crown from its brow, regardless of how much I like Google.

I Don't Recall the Words...

A great argument for learning by rote: In Defense of Memorization

I'll confess that it's been a while since I tried to learn all the lyrics to a song, or to memorize a poem, or the lines of a play, or much of anything.

I'm going to try to memorize a couple of poems, and see if there's anything of worth to it other than the ability to spout the lines out whenever I want. I suspect that there is.