Yearly Archives: 2004

A Different Point Of View

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The perceptive reader will note that we now have a different title at the top of the page. “A Different Point Of View”. Perhaps it doesn’t need to be said. Every one of us has a different point of view. Each of us has had different life experiences, and have developed different ways of looking at things. So it’s good to be able to share our views.

The BBC this morning points out one way this is happening. Blogs take on the mainstream Traditional journalists are not the only commentators on life’s events.

The crucial challenge of our world today is this: to find our voice and inspire others to find theirs. This new phenomenon is particularly important if you’re involved in any organization and must interact with members of that organization. You’ll find out more on this and how to tackle the challenge in a recent book, Stephen Covey’s – The 8th Habit: From Effectiveness to Greatness.

Do you see what I see?

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At the end of 5 years of the third millennium, it’s interesting to guess how the Internet may be evolving. Clearly it changes rapidly and dramatically. Here is one view of the past few years. How do you see the story continuing?

Phase 1. The birth of the Internet – The hyper-linking of web pages and documents create a web-like structure. Any item in the Internet is connected to any other item in the Internet by hyperlinks. The Internet is for humans.

Phase 2. The growth of the Internet – This inter-connectedness of information is so effective and valuable to its users that more and more items are added to the Internet.

Phase 3. The emergence of search engines – To help humans work through this web, search engines create spiders or robots that can give a short list of web pages deemed to be relevant to someone’s interest in a certain keyword phrase. The Google search engine is so thorough, speedy and user-friendly, that it becomes the search engine of choice for the vast majority of people.

Phase 4. The mechanism (algorithm) of the Google search engine values the number of other web pages that give links to a given web page. This creates a pressure on web page owners to create large numbers of related web pages that can provide links to their target web pages. The Internet grows rapidly and somewhat artificially under these conditions. The word ‘bloat’ might well be appropriate.

Phase 5. This rapid growth is accelerated even more by the ready availability of ‘blogging’ software. Everyone can easily create ‘blog’ items commenting on current events. The search engines find these blog items very useful sources of information content and so rapidly scavenge the Internet to find new items as they are created. The Internet therefore grows explosively.

Phase 6. The Internet is no longer something that a human searcher can aim to be knowledgeable on. It is so huge and grows so rapidly that each human must rely on an associated computer that can ceaselessly look for relevant news items on topics of interest. The availability of news feeds (RSS / Atom) for new web pages or blog entries allows the computer to become the essential watcher for anything new that may be added to the Internet.

Phase 7. The picture of the Internet now is of this huge and rapidly growing flood of web pages. Human beings with associated computer robots can only attempt to keep partially aware of interesting developments that may be of interest to them. Unfortunately there is no easy way to designate which web pages may be more authoritative or original.

So how will the story continue from this point forward? Will we see the flood continuing to grow uncontrollably? Will each of us capture only a small fraction of what may be potentially useful to us? Or is there some new technology or social grouping that will keep us above the flood?

My COW is not one of those COWs

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Heard a new acronym this morning on a Cre8asite Forums thread on learning systems. COWs stands for ‘Computers On Wheels’. It’s a handy device used in UK schools that carries a stack of lap-top computers from one classroom to another. The whole stack can have their batteries recharged at once. It seemed to be just the ticket.

My COW is something different, although it has had an even more dramatic effect on the way I do things. It stands for ‘Computer On Watch’. It’s changed me from a proactive searcher of news items to a reactive reviewer of news items. My computer is doing what it does best and it’s produced astonishing gains in my productivity. The new breakthrough is caused by the wide availability of RSS newsfeeds. Most important sources of news items now also have a RSS newsfeed. Using a news aggregator that will scan whatever newsfeeds I’ve chosen, my computer warns me when something new has occurred. I use Bloglines but there are lots out there. So while my computer watches, I can concentrate on my work.

I’ve cut out most e-mail advices and ezines. I’ve also stopped visiting most forums. I wait until there’s something new and can then decide from a brief summary whether it’s worth checking out the full news item. I would recommend that everyone gets a COW.

Domain Names: the ultimate "vanity plates"

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Online vanity plates, think domain names.

The market for domain names is unlike any other. The supply of domains is unlimited. They were running out of the .com domain name version. So they’ve started selling many other extensions. The selected TLDs are: .aero (for the air-transport industry), .biz (for businesses), .coop (for cooperatives), .info (for all uses), .museum (for museums), .name (for individuals), and .pro (for professions). They’re still selling like hot cakes. In a sense it’s like the ‘roll-your-own’ phenomenon. Anyone can make up a domain name and provided no one else has ‘bought’ it then they can pay for it and it exists.

There’s an interesting thread in the Cre8asite Forums that got me thinking more on domain names. Someone is frustrated that his boss wants to optimize a website for the search engines with no domain name at all. Well the boss isn’t as wrong as he seems on this question of domain names.

Why does everyone want one? I believe this stems largely from two popular misconceptions. The first is that a domain name is worth something. Well yes if the domain name is business.com or sex.com or man.com, perhaps that’s true. However the vast majority of domain names have value only to their creator.

The second misconception is that search engines place some value on domain names in ranking websites for keyword searches. Domain names probably have as much influence with the search engines as those keyword metatags. That influence is close to zero. Some people are convinced that their keyword-rich domain name was the factor that increased their search engine ranking. However rarely are tests done to see whether it was the domain name or the content or the backlinks text.

Domain names are important in bringing some visitors to company websites, but that requires a careful choice of company name in the first place. Even the experts often get the choice of their domain name wrong. A better approach is to choose your company name and your domain name so that you “own” that domain name on the Internet. In other words, typing that domain name without the extension in a search engine field will produce your website at the top of the list.

Few domain names pass that test. Most are really just a way of someone feeling a warm glow that they are getting their 15 minutes of fame. There are other and perhaps better ways. In Canada for example you can give recognition to the name of someone by dedicating a piece of the Trans Canada Trail. Dedicating 1 metre of the 18,078,000 metres of the trail to a given name costs $ 50 Canadian. That’s about what it costs to have your own personalized number plate for your automobile in some regions. Or for about the same cost, you can create your own domain name. It’s an interesting speculation as to which of these, Trail dedication, automobile “vanity plate” or domain name will give the best visibility.

Is Weightwatchers a Victim of the Current Web Browser War?

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There is a real war brewing in the Web browser world. Wars create victims in some of the most amazing ways. Here’s some thoughts about some of these victims.

Internet Explorer has been slowly losing market position, given the significant security concerns, sometimes expressed even by government agencies. The trend seems inevitable. For example, only 73% of visitors to the SMM website in September and October were using a version of Internet Explorer. The choice of Web browser can influence many other associated activities so it’s a lucrative market to enter. Even Google was rumoured to be considering its own Web browser although that has since been denied. The security concerns are tough for Microsoft to handle although the aversion to change of most users will slow any exodus.

The new kid on the block is Firefox 1.0, now just released with increasing hype and publicity. If significant numbers of potential customers are switching to a different Web browser, it is important that the company website works for them. As Firefox itself notes, many “blue-chip” websites may have been set up to work with Internet Explorer. Such websites will need to ‘upgrade’ to work for all customers.

Sometimes the changes are likely to be small. For example, as of today November 18th the website for Weightwatchers shows a Site Requirements page when viewed with Firefox. This suggests that cookies and javascript must be enabled, even when both are already enabled. The only way to view the website is with another Web browser. This irritation could be easily corrected once the Web designer realizes that potential customers may be coming via this new Web browser.

However there is a more fundamental and very much more important issue at play here.

Firefox and Internet Explorer are based on fundamentally opposing philosophies about Web design standards. Firefox assumes that Web design standards will be followed and is fairly unforgiving if they are not. The Internet Explorer browser does not itself always follow the standards. In some cases, Web designers have had to do patches to get a website that follows the standards to also display well in IE. So some websites that display reasonably in Internet Explorer may look very different when viewed with Firefox. For some unfortunately the Firefox result can be most unattractive.

This possibly didn’t matter when IE had 95% of the Web browser market. You might only be losing 1 in 20 of your customers because your website didn’t work. Now for some company websites, you may be dealing with a much higher proportion of potential customers lost. So more and more web designers will become aware of the standards and will try to make their websites compatible with the standards.

The Microsoft Internet Explorer philosophy is clearly set out in the IEblog. As you can read there,
We’ve had more than a few comments suggesting that … we cater to those people who don’t code their pages correctly, or people who otherwise didn’t do things the right way. These comments frequently go on to suggest that we (the IE team) should use our market position to force people to fix their broken stuff.
…
We feel it is vitally important for web sites and applications that worked with yesterday’s IE work with today’s IE, and continue to work with tomorrow’s IE. We feel this is a deeply held expectation by the millions of IE users.
There is the implicit assumption that it is all the non-Microsoft Web designers who have created this legacy of non-conforming websites. However Microsoft is partly to blame in devising a Web browser that does not conform with standards.

So who is the biggest victim now? Well of course Microsoft itself. If they are wise, there should be high-level strategic meetings to review their stance. What they’re saying is that anything that works with the current IE is acceptable? So what deviations from standards are acceptable? Do you have to set up some new “Loose Standards” to define what is now acceptable? They’re also saying this will be their position … for ever. You see the horns of the dilemma that Microsoft is on. It’s a tough position.

If the marketplace moves to more standards-compliant websites, what kind of pressures does that put on Microsoft?