mediajunk

Corporate blogger Jared Blank of Jupiter Research has written an interesting article entitled "What If You Built a Blog and No One Came?" that deals with the problems of how to generate traffic to a diary site.

"Writing the Weblog is the easy part," says Blank, "the challenge is publicizing it." I couldn't agree more! The piece is interesting because it goes beyond the traditional freebie ways of publicizing -- viral (email) marketing to communities; etc. -- and takes a look at buying ad-words on Google.

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Speaking of which, I was disappointed when I read the article "Is Google God?" that appeared in the NY Times today. The piece actually starts off well, with some interesting stats:

The piece twists, however, into a mildly paranoic interpretation of what this global internet growth holds in store:

I was not surprised then, when I Googled the author Thomas Friedman, to discover that his current book explores "the world after September 11th".

Google has launched a beta version of its upgraded toolbar, version 2.0. I didn't bother downloading as the new features are essentially gimmicky -- like ad blocker and form auto-fill -- and do not enhance web searching.

In keeping with my previous post about Google's (poor) sense of aesthetic design, check out the centred red text on this page. Eeewgh!

We all admire Google's commitment to usability. But usability and sexy design should not be mutually exclusive.

Google started out well: its homepage is usable but aesthetically elegant. As more pages have been added to the site, however, Google has failed to maintain the balance between pragmatism & style.

The latest addition to Google’s site -- the adsense page -- is the least stylish yet. The page balance is askew; the layout is asymmetrical. Left-aligned elements compete for visual attention with centered elements and boxed elements. The result: the page looks too busy, too clumsy.

This inconsistency is found too in the haphazard use of borders -- some are hairline, others are thick – which, along with the general lack of “breathing space” between elements, adds to the overall sense of untidiness.

Worst of all is the extremely thick border around the submit buttons. Talk about overkill. Relax, Google. We know the buttons are there. We see them. Sheesh. (What next: < blink> tags?)

Frankly, https://www.google.com/adsense is ugly. Perhaps Google has too many computer science PhDs and not enough -- if any -- aesthetically-sensitive employees?

The New York Times has a feature on corporate blogging, which, according to the article's headline, is catching on.

Disappointingly, the piece does not give much of an insight into the potential benefits for executives (e.g. online identity management); what types of executives should blog (blogging isn't for everyone!); what they should blog about; the style they should use; how often they should blog; how long a post should be; etc.

The particular examples given in the article (such as Christopher Ireland's blog) are not particularly good examples of blogging (I would have chosen a better-presented, more entertaining blog, such as Kevin Lynch's).

The article (by Thom Weidlich) makes bland and rather obvious observations ("Blogs have drawbacks. Ms. Ireland has already been unsettled by a query from a reader for more personal information"). It doesn't tackle the biggest issue of corporate blogging -- the clash between the individual and the organization.

Hmmm... maybe I should go and write an article on corporate blogging myself. Then again, I'm so busy blogging, where would I find the time?

Microsoft was on the crest of every new wave of the computer industry for a decade, until the internet broke loose in the early 1990s. Microsoft didn't see the internet coming, and so had to play catch-up, getting involved in the legendary "browser war" with Netscape.

More recently, Bill Gates's company missed out on establishing a dominant search engine -- a niche impressively stolen by user-focused Google.

Microsoft has been struggling to get ahead of the internet curve ever since. Despite years of hype about its always-immenent "dot net" project, the company has largely failed to be innovative in the internet space.

The software giant risks falling into the IBM trap: growing too sluggish and arrogant to predict, or even react quickly to, new market trends. It is unsurprising that as the popularity of blogging soared during the last 12 months, Microsoft gave little indication that it has even noticed the phenomenon.

Until now. The company has announced that its flagship web design product, FrontPage, will feature "prebuilt functionality to ease creation of blogs" (exactly what that means remains to be seen) in its next release, expected to ship late this summer.

Microsoft is also planning an internal panel to discuss employee weblogging. So far, the company has no policy on corporate blogging, even though over one hundred of its employees are known to publish personal web logs.

Several of these bloggers are to "testify" at this panel. But what will Microsoft decide? If it bans employee blogging, Microsoft will give the impression that, like the music industry, it is out of touch with social trends.

On the other hand, Microsoft could regain lost credibility by endorsing and encouraging in-house blogging -- and provide new tools and services to the public, to enhance the wider blogosphere.

In short, Microsoft needs to pay attention to emerging companies like Moveable Type. As does everyone else -- including Google.

I think someone should tell the presumably innocent folks at PowerGenitalia.com that um, well, you'll see what I mean...

The FBI could be reading your blog! That's the conclusion you might jump to from the story of how two agents turned up on 17-year old blogger Erin Carter's doortstep. In truth, the Independent Online's article makes you realize that the FBI are highly unlikely to be reading your blog -- unless you're fraudulently making a lot of money from it:

"In cyber crime they're stretched so thin that there has to be a monetary threshold crossed before they can dedicate their resources to investigating it," comments Dan Verton, author of Hacker Diaries. "It's somewhere along the order of five or 10 thousand dollars before they'll even come out and talk to you."

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Here's an interesting concept in website searching/marketing. The Stumbleupon toolbar -- a plugin for your browser, like the Google toolbar -- lets you rate sites as you visit them, and other users get to see the overall ratings. The toolbar also suggests sites that you might like, based on your preferences. Its creators call it the "word-of-mouth" web.

The trouble is, Stumbleupon itself doesn't seem to be getting much word-of-mouth promotion. Too bad, because it's one of those concepts that needs a critical mass before it can take off.

Expect one of the bigger names on the web to introduce a similar concept in the future...

A small complaint in a quiet corner of cyberspace caught my attention today: Morgan Wilson is upset that a couple of her (his?) favourite blogs have recently disappeared.

The phenomenon is not isolated: many people start blogs without realizing how much time and commitment is needed to keep them going. (I've mentioned before that William Gibson -- whose site is currently 4th in the Google search returns for "blog" -- has declared his intention to discontinue the practice after his current book tour.)

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When I wrote, a few months ago, about the creative potential in combining MMS picture-phones with web technology, I didn't expect people to get quite so anal about it!

I don't do "links to other blogs I like".

But there's an exception to every rule:

OTHER BLOGS I LIKE
1. Ultramicroscopic is ultramagnificient.

Google has agreed a deal with Lycos to deliver contexualized ads on the portal's member pages.

Lycos offers free web space to members, in exchange for the right to put annoying ads on the resulting sites (take a look at this random-chosen and typically ad-blighted Lycos member's page). Google will presumably use its infamous algorithm to glean the meaning of the page (though such rudimentary meaning-gleaning is a far cry from genuine AI), and thereby select an appropriate category of advertisements.

The move confirms widely held suspicions that Google is moving aggressively into hard-nosed business mode (at the risk, perhaps, of its heretofore pristine brand). But it also tells us something about the nature of advertising on the web.

The banner ad never really took off on the web. Advertisers learned that, when given a choice, users prefer to ignore ads, and certainly do not care to interact with them. Clickthrough rates for banner ads are typically less than 0.01%. The advantage that advertisers had in other media -- namely, the passivity of the audience -- has been lost on the web.

To counteract, then, advertisers have had to get smarter, and respond to the wishes of consumers. But is contexualization really enough to make web advertising take off?

I doubt it. Modern consumers -- especially young, savvy web users -- are techno-literate enough to understand how targeted advertising works and not to be unduly allured by it. Unfortunately, advertisers will therefore probably continue to adopt more underhand techniques, such as pop-ups; pop-unders; uncloseable windows; and other spammy strategies that have already been tried and tested by the most shameless of them all -- the porn industry.

Given Google's hegemony among web search engines, it's easy to forget that the company could -- some would say should -- make improvements to its service. Outer-court.com recently listed fifty suggested improvements and asked visitors to vote on which they'd most like to see included.

To be fair to Google, many of today's users probably don't realize how rich its functional offering is. To find out how to get the most out of the web's most popular site, see Google Hacks, the partner site for a book launched earlier this year by O'Reilly. Typical "hacks" include: how to perform phone searches; how to get around the 10-words restriction; etc.

(Picture from www.lifestyle-movement.org.uk)

Bringing closure to the long-running Salam Pax saga, not only has the Baghdad Blogger turned out to be real, but he is now writing a fortnightly column for the Guardian.

The internet's most famous blogger has not, however, revealed his true identity, or even his surname. "Do not assume, not even for a second, that because you read the blog you know who I am or who my parents are," he writes in his blog.

Peter Maass of Slate assures us, however, that Salam is at least a genuine first name. But even Maass didn't know that the young man who was working for him as an interpreter was actually the web's Scarlet Pimpernell. Read the funny account of how Maass found out the truth.