Saturday, December 31, 2005
Radio Shack: A Not So BrightPoint For Skype: "I often tell clients that it's not about 'selling in,' it's about 'selling through' that matters in retail product marketing. Too often we hear about the 'big announcement' from a company in the technology products space that tells us all that they landed a 'retail partnership' with so and so. That's why when I spotted Phil Wolff's post about Radio Shack and Skype I had to laugh, not at the post, but in full agreement. Phil is dead on with his assessment. Here's why.With Radio Shack you have the ultimate geek product retailer with thousands of locations around the world. Radio Shack is a chain that has been better at selling batteries, voltage detectors, plugs, switches and yes, cell phones than all others on the planet and they got married up with the fastest growing online service ever. Skype.What could be better. I mean all those free users who want extra add-on accessories for early adoptive geeks. Heck, Radio Shack has been selling to that crowd for years. It's called the aftermarket and in many ways the products Radio Shack sells are either their own or name brands that people can trust to fuel that sector. Radio Shack also sells a lot of off beat, arcane items that has made them the geek and toy idiot type's favorite place to always look for what they know is out there, but was never e"
10 Web Trends That Should Die in 2006 - blog.outer-court.com/archive/2005-12-31-n34.html
10 Web Trends That Should Die in 2006 * * *
SATURDAY, DECEMBER 31, 2005
10 WEB TRENDS THAT SHOULD DIE IN 2006
Here's a new years resolution for the web at large: stop doing silly
things to users. Following are top trends that I just hope will not
see 2007.
1. "Our Article Is Too Long, Let's Split It Up Into Many Pages."
You know, I like the Wired site, but they really shouldn't split up
articles into two different pages. First of all, the "continue"
button isn't user-friendly. While you might say "it speeds up loading
of the page", the truth is, when you're finished reading through half
the article, the other half could have been quietly finished loading
in the background. In other words, by splicing up the page in halves,
Wired actually increased loading time. But maybe they're not doing it
for the user, but to get better stats and show off more ads?
What might be even more annoying about split articles is the fact
that you can't link to them in any meaningful way. If I pull a quote
from article page 2, where should I link to as a blogger? To both
articles? To the article beginning, which would make more sense to
the reader who doesn't know the article... but which doesn't contain
the quote? I guess that's why many bloggers link straight to the
print version of some of these articles (they are less cluttered,
too).
Last not least, an article that's spread out on different pages
doesn't bode well with visitors coming from search engines. Not only
will the Google not show the article if the user searched for 1 word
appearing only in the first half, and 1 word which appeared only in
the second half; readers may also directly stumble upon page 2, and
then don't understand the context well and leave.
2. "We Have Art Content, So Let's Create An Artistic Navigation."
You know, sometimes the navigation is the content, for example when
you're playing an (online or offline) adventure game. Then, a player
wants to have a hard time defeating barriers.
An art website, however, is not an adventure game, and artful
navigation (yeah, we get the point, the website is part of the
artwork) can really hurt the experience. Even when you have drastic,
challenging, and unusual content to show off... there's nothing that
says you can't simply link to a well-made web video or similar
content.
Not long ago, I came across a specific Japanese artist website.
There was so much neon blinking and movement, at first I didn't even
understand that it was completely broken and not showing as intended.
Then I switched to Internet Explorer, and the blinking and movement
started to make a little sense... but still gave me a hard time
trying to locate the contact info.
3. "Let's Ignore The Rest Of The World."
There are so many web applications that only work in the US, at
times the web can be a boring place if you sit in Germany (or
anywhere else outside the US). If I could get a dime for every web
2.0 release that wasn't localized in 2005, I... well, you know the
story.
If small-time developers don't have the resources to localize,
that's understandable - but the big ones like Google, Amazon, Yahoo,
Apple? And often, it's not even an issue of resources; sometimes,
there's intentional copyright protection to prevent non-US users
(e.g. the iTunes music store, DVD region codes of course, and many
more), or country-specific censorship (e.g. the Google results,
which, by the way, are very much spammed for German search queries).
Even when the sites are localized, translations are often shabby.
Just for fun I read through the German Gmail page yesterday, and one
of the sentences was complete grammar garbage. Would this happen to
the English Gmail front-page as well? I doubt it.
4. "Let's Spam Everything (blog Comments, Email Accounts, Referrer
Stats, Discussion Groups Etc.)!"
I don't think spammers will ever give up, not in 2006 or 2060... but
hope dies last.
5. "Let's Treat The Mobile Web As A Separate Entity."
It's kind of sad. First, there was the world wide web and HTML. One
of the reasons Tim Berners-Lee created HTML the way he did (next to
making it be based on SGML, which pleased the SGML crowd, of course)
was to have a platform and media independent format to prevent having
to have a certain computer to open a certain document. That's why on
the web's client-side we have the separation of content,
functionality and layout into HTML, JS, and CSS respectively. I can
create a single media-neutral HTML, and offer the browser (or user
agent, as the W3C calls it) different media-specific style sheets to
choose from... and let the browser ignore the style sheet if nothing
fitting can be found (which results in the naked content), which is
enough in certain situations.
Now, that being said, you may wonder: why did people ever invent
WML, an additional format to serve mobile browsers? And I guess the
rest of the world asked the same question when WML came out, which is
probably why it's dead today. Plain HTML can serve mobile browsers
fine already (at least those mobile browsers that get the web)! And
yet, many websites (including Google) treat the mobile web as a whole
different beast. It's great Gmail has a dozen inline frames to speed
up loading of the page, but I would give all that back if I could use
their service on my Nokia 6600 (I can't). There are ways to use less
JavaScript than many online tools do, and to find compatible ways to
make the page work even without JavaScript.
You don't want to read long texts on a mobile browser? Well, you
don't have to, if you don't want to (actually, you could, if the
display is crisp). You don't want to have Text to Speech technology
read you a link blog? Of course not. We are using the web in a
variety of different contexts in our life, and we go to different
websites for that. We might read a news site in the train, we might
watch a movie site on our desktop computer, or we might listen to a
novel site while jogging. This all can only be achieved by going back
to Tim's original version, and creating platform neutral websites
(ideally, with platform neutral media types attached to it).
6. "Let's Do A Traditional Homepage For Our Company."
A stock photo of a smiling phone support lady, surefire way to spot
a "traditional homepage."
A traditional homepage typically consists of:
*A nested navigational structure with no way to find out which
parts have changed, *A lonely press release corner titled "News",
*Practically no external links unless the site linked to is an
official partner in some way, *A hypothetical "front-door navigation
path" approach to usability, which is so '94, *No signatures or date
stamps below articles, *Advertisement bogus content, which no one
cares to read about.
I hope in 2006, major companies who are still on the web 1.0 train
will upgrade to the world of blogs, podcasts, RSS, etc., and replace
their "homepages" with it. The most important part of all of this,
next to the technical buzzwords, is really about direct communication
from people within the company to the people reading along on the web.
This has all been put down years ago in the Cluetrain Manifesto, which
should be on the desk of everyone working at a web agency.
7. "Let's Care About Low Bandwidth!"
You know, it's nice when sites like iFilm offer you three different
choices to continue playing their videos. But who wants to see those
tiny blurred low-bandwidth videos anyway? What I want are even bigger
video sizes - I'll promise to wait longer for better quality, and
maybe those with low bandwidths should stop wanting to download
videos all day. As soon as iFilm and others give me something I can
enjoy looking at - and maybe link straight to the video instead of
embedding it, so I can download it in the background - I'll be back.
Maybe in 2006?
8. "Let's Read Out Loud The URL On TV."
I don't know, I always think it's funny when someone on TV says, "To
find out more about this news magazine go to www.blabla.com." Duh, I
could also enter the name of the magazine into a search engine
instead, that works without you telling me.
9. "Let's Tell Everyone Firefox Is The Better Browser."
I'm a user of Firefox. I like Firefox. What I don't like is hubris.
And the Firefox promotion at times sure shows signs of it. Firefox is
more secure? I don't know, but I do know that those writing malicious
website code have reason to target the one browser with the largest
installed user base (Internet Explorer). If Firefox ever gets to be
in that position, let's see if it's more secure.
Instead of telling people Firefox is better, I hope people more
truthfully put the spotlight onto Firefox's many bugs... some of
which have been newly introduced in upgrades, and some of which are
serious enough to become a daily annoyance. (The last bug report I
filed was before the 1.0 final release, and it has been ignored to
this day, so I'm not very eager to report more bugs.) Some of the
bugs introduced in Firefox 1.5 are so serious, I have to restart the
browser to enter a single quote character into form fields (great
feature for a blogger). The better browser?
10. "Let's Have A Tiny Font That Looks Better."
I guess that issue needs to be repeated until it's solved (I think
Nielsen talks about it once a year)... don't use tiny fonts, web
developers, it's the #1 reason hurting readability of your content!
Also see: .
by Philipp Lenssen |
(c) 2003-2005 by . Not affiliated with Google(tm). See the for
more.
or your news tips.
Elsewhere:
SATURDAY, DECEMBER 31, 2005
10 WEB TRENDS THAT SHOULD DIE IN 2006
Here's a new years resolution for the web at large: stop doing silly
things to users. Following are top trends that I just hope will not
see 2007.
1. "Our Article Is Too Long, Let's Split It Up Into Many Pages."
You know, I like the Wired site, but they really shouldn't split up
articles into two different pages. First of all, the "continue"
button isn't user-friendly. While you might say "it speeds up loading
of the page", the truth is, when you're finished reading through half
the article, the other half could have been quietly finished loading
in the background. In other words, by splicing up the page in halves,
Wired actually increased loading time. But maybe they're not doing it
for the user, but to get better stats and show off more ads?
What might be even more annoying about split articles is the fact
that you can't link to them in any meaningful way. If I pull a quote
from article page 2, where should I link to as a blogger? To both
articles? To the article beginning, which would make more sense to
the reader who doesn't know the article... but which doesn't contain
the quote? I guess that's why many bloggers link straight to the
print version of some of these articles (they are less cluttered,
too).
Last not least, an article that's spread out on different pages
doesn't bode well with visitors coming from search engines. Not only
will the Google not show the article if the user searched for 1 word
appearing only in the first half, and 1 word which appeared only in
the second half; readers may also directly stumble upon page 2, and
then don't understand the context well and leave.
2. "We Have Art Content, So Let's Create An Artistic Navigation."
You know, sometimes the navigation is the content, for example when
you're playing an (online or offline) adventure game. Then, a player
wants to have a hard time defeating barriers.
An art website, however, is not an adventure game, and artful
navigation (yeah, we get the point, the website is part of the
artwork) can really hurt the experience. Even when you have drastic,
challenging, and unusual content to show off... there's nothing that
says you can't simply link to a well-made web video or similar
content.
Not long ago, I came across a specific Japanese artist website.
There was so much neon blinking and movement, at first I didn't even
understand that it was completely broken and not showing as intended.
Then I switched to Internet Explorer, and the blinking and movement
started to make a little sense... but still gave me a hard time
trying to locate the contact info.
3. "Let's Ignore The Rest Of The World."
There are so many web applications that only work in the US, at
times the web can be a boring place if you sit in Germany (or
anywhere else outside the US). If I could get a dime for every web
2.0 release that wasn't localized in 2005, I... well, you know the
story.
If small-time developers don't have the resources to localize,
that's understandable - but the big ones like Google, Amazon, Yahoo,
Apple? And often, it's not even an issue of resources; sometimes,
there's intentional copyright protection to prevent non-US users
(e.g. the iTunes music store, DVD region codes of course, and many
more), or country-specific censorship (e.g. the Google results,
which, by the way, are very much spammed for German search queries).
Even when the sites are localized, translations are often shabby.
Just for fun I read through the German Gmail page yesterday, and one
of the sentences was complete grammar garbage. Would this happen to
the English Gmail front-page as well? I doubt it.
4. "Let's Spam Everything (blog Comments, Email Accounts, Referrer
Stats, Discussion Groups Etc.)!"
I don't think spammers will ever give up, not in 2006 or 2060... but
hope dies last.
5. "Let's Treat The Mobile Web As A Separate Entity."
It's kind of sad. First, there was the world wide web and HTML. One
of the reasons Tim Berners-Lee created HTML the way he did (next to
making it be based on SGML, which pleased the SGML crowd, of course)
was to have a platform and media independent format to prevent having
to have a certain computer to open a certain document. That's why on
the web's client-side we have the separation of content,
functionality and layout into HTML, JS, and CSS respectively. I can
create a single media-neutral HTML, and offer the browser (or user
agent, as the W3C calls it) different media-specific style sheets to
choose from... and let the browser ignore the style sheet if nothing
fitting can be found (which results in the naked content), which is
enough in certain situations.
Now, that being said, you may wonder: why did people ever invent
WML, an additional format to serve mobile browsers? And I guess the
rest of the world asked the same question when WML came out, which is
probably why it's dead today. Plain HTML can serve mobile browsers
fine already (at least those mobile browsers that get the web)! And
yet, many websites (including Google) treat the mobile web as a whole
different beast. It's great Gmail has a dozen inline frames to speed
up loading of the page, but I would give all that back if I could use
their service on my Nokia 6600 (I can't). There are ways to use less
JavaScript than many online tools do, and to find compatible ways to
make the page work even without JavaScript.
You don't want to read long texts on a mobile browser? Well, you
don't have to, if you don't want to (actually, you could, if the
display is crisp). You don't want to have Text to Speech technology
read you a link blog? Of course not. We are using the web in a
variety of different contexts in our life, and we go to different
websites for that. We might read a news site in the train, we might
watch a movie site on our desktop computer, or we might listen to a
novel site while jogging. This all can only be achieved by going back
to Tim's original version, and creating platform neutral websites
(ideally, with platform neutral media types attached to it).
6. "Let's Do A Traditional Homepage For Our Company."
A stock photo of a smiling phone support lady, surefire way to spot
a "traditional homepage."
A traditional homepage typically consists of:
*A nested navigational structure with no way to find out which
parts have changed, *A lonely press release corner titled "News",
*Practically no external links unless the site linked to is an
official partner in some way, *A hypothetical "front-door navigation
path" approach to usability, which is so '94, *No signatures or date
stamps below articles, *Advertisement bogus content, which no one
cares to read about.
I hope in 2006, major companies who are still on the web 1.0 train
will upgrade to the world of blogs, podcasts, RSS, etc., and replace
their "homepages" with it. The most important part of all of this,
next to the technical buzzwords, is really about direct communication
from people within the company to the people reading along on the web.
This has all been put down years ago in the Cluetrain Manifesto, which
should be on the desk of everyone working at a web agency.
7. "Let's Care About Low Bandwidth!"
You know, it's nice when sites like iFilm offer you three different
choices to continue playing their videos. But who wants to see those
tiny blurred low-bandwidth videos anyway? What I want are even bigger
video sizes - I'll promise to wait longer for better quality, and
maybe those with low bandwidths should stop wanting to download
videos all day. As soon as iFilm and others give me something I can
enjoy looking at - and maybe link straight to the video instead of
embedding it, so I can download it in the background - I'll be back.
Maybe in 2006?
8. "Let's Read Out Loud The URL On TV."
I don't know, I always think it's funny when someone on TV says, "To
find out more about this news magazine go to www.blabla.com." Duh, I
could also enter the name of the magazine into a search engine
instead, that works without you telling me.
9. "Let's Tell Everyone Firefox Is The Better Browser."
I'm a user of Firefox. I like Firefox. What I don't like is hubris.
And the Firefox promotion at times sure shows signs of it. Firefox is
more secure? I don't know, but I do know that those writing malicious
website code have reason to target the one browser with the largest
installed user base (Internet Explorer). If Firefox ever gets to be
in that position, let's see if it's more secure.
Instead of telling people Firefox is better, I hope people more
truthfully put the spotlight onto Firefox's many bugs... some of
which have been newly introduced in upgrades, and some of which are
serious enough to become a daily annoyance. (The last bug report I
filed was before the 1.0 final release, and it has been ignored to
this day, so I'm not very eager to report more bugs.) Some of the
bugs introduced in Firefox 1.5 are so serious, I have to restart the
browser to enter a single quote character into form fields (great
feature for a blogger). The better browser?
10. "Let's Have A Tiny Font That Looks Better."
I guess that issue needs to be repeated until it's solved (I think
Nielsen talks about it once a year)... don't use tiny fonts, web
developers, it's the #1 reason hurting readability of your content!
Also see: .
by Philipp Lenssen |
(c) 2003-2005 by . Not affiliated with Google(tm). See the for
more.
or your news tips.
Elsewhere:
P/E vs S&P 500 (50 Years): "As promised, today brings us to the 4th in our series of charts: P/E vs SP500click for larger chart courtesy of Mike Panzner, Rabo Securities I'll get into the significance of what this means to the markets later, but for now, note where the P/E is over the median, and..."
Public Domain Torrents: "with iPod and PDA versions, too; try the top 20 movies "
Squid soup, part I: The Myth of the Product Adoption Lifecycle: "One of the most important ideas in business writing is certainly Geoff Moore’s Crossing the Chasm. In it, he talks about the bell curve that indicates how any population will respond to a new technology. The little green tail on the left represent the few, the brave, the innovators. These are the geeks and the nerds that love new stuff. The black segment next to it are the early adopters (not adapters, that means something else) that embrace new ideas that help them do the rest of their lives more productively. The next group picks up new ideas a little more slowly (these are the folks who bought an iPod last year) and the next group completes the mass market (these are the ones that will buy an iPod next year). The last group are the laggards and they still have a record player. One of the giant insights of the new marketing is that the only way to introduce a new idea is to move across the curve. Sell to the little tail, they tell the next group, which passes the word on to the mass market. That’s why the little tiny green tail is so valuable... these are the people who are listening, these are the people who will become your marketing force. So, where’s the myth? The myth is that marketers think these people actually care. People don’t care, "
A license to steal: "Knights Back in the Y1K, a knight was invincible. A knight mounted on horseback could not be defeated by the peasantry. A suit of armor was very expensive, but it afforded the wearer the ability to do what he wanted, when he wanted. A knight could go into a village and demand tribute, and the villagers could do nothing. It was, in essence, a license to steal. Technology created the knight, and technology ruined the knight. The steel and iron armor of the day could deflect sword and lance blows. That lasted until the invention of the Welsh longbow, and later handheld firearms. Anybody could become a knight, however a knight's steed and armor were very expensive. Politics couldn't bring much violence to bear on knights. Only another knight could defeat a knight. The church did its best to keep knights from being the horseback equivalent of the motorcycle gang by its chivalric code. Patents The US patent system has become amenable to a protection racket. First, you start a patent holding company. Then you get a patent. It should be something broadly written so that everything plausibly infringes it. Then you go to a small company and say 'You infringe this patent. We will sue you, or you can settle for $1000.' Obviously the small company settles; it would be insane to do anything else. You keep going to more and more companies, increasing t"
