This is a great time of year for those who enjoy studying marketing and copywriting – every day, the mailbox is full of catalogs, each with their own style. One long time favorite is Hammacher Schlemmer, home of products like The Best Nose Hair Trimmer.
Nov 302005
Nov 302005
Lots of newscasts talked about “Cyber Monday”, supposedly the ecommerce equivalent to brick & mortar stores “Black Friday”. The latter is the day after the U.S. Thanskgiving holiday when shoppers line up in the pre-dawn hours to take advantage of sales that last a few hours. Black Friday is the busiest shopping day of the year, and is so named because it is the day when some retailers finally make up for losses incurred in the first ten months of the year and get to use “black ink” on their financials.
Nov 292005
Think your online community has some members who go overboard in giving virtual hugs? Watch out, the cyber hug suit may be coming sooner than you think. Although right now the Singaporean researcher James Teh has only designed a chicken-sized version, he wants to develop a human version that would, for example, allow a traveling parent to hug a child. The jacket transmits pressure and vibration to the chicken wearing the suit. If this technology proliferates, there will be no stopping the compulsive huggers.
Nov 242005
Brett Tabke’s WebmasterWorld.com is arguably one of the most successful communities on the Web, boasting tens of thousands of members, a large and active group of fee-paying “Supporters”, and an unusually high Alexa ranking that keeps it in the top 500 sites and occasionally in the top 250. A good portion of the community’s growth over the years can be attributed to visitors from Google, Yahoo, and other search engines. Historically, a search for a webmaster-related tech topic produced a listing of a WebmasterWorld discussion on the topic more often than not. New arrivals were often surprised by the friendly and helpful nature of the community, and ended up becoming regular participants.
Nov 232005
A while back, I reported on an Adsense – YPN comparison at the Jensense blog. Now that I’ve had a chance to play with Yahoo Publisher Network and compare it to the longer-established Adsense, I thought I’d share a few quick findings. My primary test was on a relatively high-volume (200K pageviews daily) site, with some limited work on low-volume sites as well.
Nov 222005
CNN.com reports on a new study showing that search engine use is up substantially since last year. 63% of Internet users report using a search engine, vs. 56% in 2004. That moves search engine use into a solid second among Web tasks; e-mail is the most common. Previously, search engine use vied with news reading for second place.
Nov 222005
Hearing Bob Cringely speak at Webmasterworld’s Pubcon last week was a treat. While Cringely managed to be involved in the earliest days of both Apple Computer and Sun Microsystems without becoming a gazillionaire, that depth of experience in the industry gives him a unique perspective.
Nov 182005
One of the interesting comments made by Matt Cutts, senior engineer at Google, at yesterday’s WebmasterWorld.com Pubcon conference was that Google doesn’t boost sites for specific search results. Search engine optimizers have speculated that Google sometimes hand-tweaks results to improve quality or achieve some other search objective. In fact, according to Cutts, Google can’t manually boost a site, e.g., making the FDA site the top result for a pharmaceutical search.
Nov 172005
Today at Webmasterworld.com’s Pubcon in Las Vegas, senior Google engineer Matt Cutts confirmed, in a way, the reality of the Google sandbox. The so-called sandbox is an effect reported by some search engine optimization experts in which a new website is included in the Google Search index but is practically invisible in search results for a period of months, and sometimes a year or more. The very existence of the sandbox has been debated by SEOs, with some claiming that sites seeming to be in the sandbox are simply not ranking well because of lack of inbound linkage, poor on-page optimization, etc.
Nov 112005
Jon Stahl’s Journal talks about a new tool for community building in How Plone Can Become Kick-Ass Community Collaboration Software. Plone is an open-source CMS (Content Management System). In a lengthy analysis, Stahl focuses on key community building features: