MRN, now what might that be? Hopefully not just confusion with MSN. Off the bat we should mention that it is not Market Research News.

One must be very careful with acronyms as Marty Weintraub points out: Think SEO Before You Name Your New Company! He illustrates the difficulties with the acronym MRI.

The business is called “Masters Recording Institute.” Cool name right? Let’s take a more careful look. From an SEO services perspective, it’s a classic search engine optimization blunder. To start: everybody loves initials. From our experience, a good percentage of future direct brand searches could occur on the initials “MRI.”

It’s possible that the curious are already referring to the company as such. Sadly, searches for “MRI” result in harvesting all sorts of information about “magnetic resonance imaging,” which is useless in this context. Needless to say, ranking on the average search engine results page (SERP) for the keyword MRI might take a team of link-building-specialists months - and perhaps cost quite a bit.

He is so right. Thankfully for MRN, the competition in a Google search seems less ferocious. Here are some of the top runners.

• Ministère des Ressources naturelles et de la Faune, Quebec
  http://www.mrn.gouv.qc.ca/
• MRN Radio Networks
  http://www.racingone.com/mrn_home.aspx
• Manufacturers Resource Network, owners of the MRN.com domain
  http://www.mrn.com/

The other meaning of the acronym MRN is Marketing Right Now. Surprisingly there are few heavyweight contenders for this acronym. One that caught my eye was MRN - Morgue Reference Number. It does not seem all that popular despite the morbid interest that so many people seem to have in programs like CSI and Bones.

This all gives comfort that the acronym MRN can be used as a shorthand for Marketing Right Now. Hopefully Google will confirm the rightness of this choice in a little while.

Other Related Posts

• February 7, 2008 -- FREE from Chris Anderson
• May 18, 2007 -- Webmaster, an obsolete concept

John Brandon asks this morning whether interest in Google Chrome is already waning. He feels that:

People use IE because it comes pre-installed and does mostly what they need it to. Walk into an office and glance around — you will see a lot of IE. Those who know better use Firefox because it is more stable, more secure, and faster. Where does that leave Chrome? I think as a third option for early adopters. But those who just need to get work done, who use Gmail and are too busy to mess around with bugs have probably all switched back to Firefox.

Just after the launch there was an initial flurry of interest. Mark Evans commented that a number of people had checked it out with some like Walter Mossberg liking it and others like Alec Saunders suggesting it was all a shell game. Mark Evans even questioned, What Took Google So Long?

Some experts such as John Andrews even warned that ‘under the hood’ there was a Google Chrome Bait ‘n Switch. That was because of some unfortunate language in the Agreement that all users had to agree to. Google beat a hasty retreat on that one but it still left a negative impression for some.

By now, everything in the garden should be lovely. However like John Brandon, I am still left with the question as to whether this browser really has any natural customers. Clearly the power users find it lacking, yet the novices may well find its apparent simplicity somewhat baffling. I am still trying to get the Omnisearch field to accept searches with other search engines. I should be able to type ‘Yahoo cheeses‘ and get a search on Yahoo for cheeses. Perhaps the problem as PCWorld explains is that I am using Windows XP.

Type ‘google fish sticks’ to search for fish sticks on Google. The same syntax works for Yahoo, Amazon, Live Search, and other sites that are already recognized by Google or that you add. This feature, though nifty and promising, proved inconsistent in the early going: It worked for me most of the time on a Windows Vista PC, but two of my colleagues who were testing Chrome on Windows XP machines had trouble getting the feature to work.

It is all very well to have an ultra-simple browser like this, however a user manual is always obligatory. The only one I could find is the Power User’s Guide to Google Chrome. That title is an oxymoron if ever I heard one.

Posts You May Like From The Archives

• January 20, 2006 -- 50 milliseconds - what’s that as a percentage?
• August 2, 2005 -- The Internet Explorer 6 Peekaboo Bug
• March 3, 2005 -- The new J Walter Thompson - JWT

Tag clouds are not a new innovation. In 2005, Pete Freitag gave complete and somewhat complex instructions on How To Make a Tag Cloud. His website still shows a fine example of the tag cloud created by his approach.

Not everyone was so enamored by tag clouds. Jeffrey Zeldman expressed the view that Tag clouds are the new mullets. He suggested that every one was leaping onto the bandwagon of this fascinating new technology.

Before we go further it is very important to make a clear distinction between tag clouds, which provide hyperlinks to individual posts or articles, and what might better be called Word Clouds.

Some Tag Clouds Are Only Word Clouds

Some software will take a body of text and display common terms in the text by grouping like terms together and visually emphasizing the more frequent terms. These might best be called Word Clouds. Interesting examples of this are TagCrowd and the Tag Cloud Demo created by OCLC (Online Computer Library Center, Inc.).

To repeat, although the same term is used for these, these are not tag clouds, as we are using the term. They should more precisely be called word clouds.

That is not to say that what they do is not of interest. Indeed Noah Brier uses the same concept in picturing how visitors to his website, Brand Tags, perceive some common brands. As he suggests, the basic idea of the site is that a brand exists entirely in people’s heads. Therefore, whatever it is they say a brand is, is what it is. He uses word clouds to display and summarize these perceptions.

Tag Clouds That Get You There

Word clouds are of some interest, but tag clouds that include hyperlinks to other webpages clearly are much more valuable and useful. Although these tags could be determined by computer analysis, they are likely to be much more relevant if they are assigned by the author of the web page. They are now very easily handled and displayed for blogs that are using the latest version of WordPress version 2.5. A tag cloud such as that displayed in the right sidebar is easily created using the information in Template Tags/wp_tag_cloud.

The use of tag clouds is becoming more valuable as the Internet becomes increasingly crowded and search engines sometimes produce only low relevance items. Perhaps this is why Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the Internet, has received a $350,000 grant from the James S and James L. Knight Foundation to work on “source tagging”. He and Martin Moore are working with Reuters and the BBC to figure out how to incorporate this process into routine journalistic workflow.

We can only hope that “source tagging” helps you find the original items. Perhaps it hardly needs to be said given the riches that Sir Tim has given us already.

Related:
A Marketer’s Guide to Social Bookmarking & Tagging
Posted by Lisa Barone
Live blogging from SMX Social Media Marketing, April 2008, Long Beach CA

Posts You May Like From The Archives

• August 20, 2007 -- Google Rankings Drive Sales - SEO Expectations
• August 1, 2007 -- Google Supplemental Label Out, PageRank Next?
• August 3, 2005 -- Search Engines really are different - just like detergents

That evocative title, Spirit Show, came on my newsfeed radar screen this week. Even back in 2004, I was questioning whether Trade Shows Are Out? given that Internet marketing was becoming so powerful.

If you run your trade show activities now in 2004 exactly the same way as you ran them 7 years ago, then you have probably seen a major decline in ROI from this activity. Relying only on the direct selling benefit at the show is sub-optimal. You should probably seriously question your continuing trade show participation.

You remember 2004. Although Google was giving some website owners a hard time, most online e-commerce sites were doing just fine. The increased costs of travel, and the delays through heightened security were making tradeshows ever more difficult.

Now move forward to 2008. Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is still very powerful, but the new trend is Social Media Marketing (SMM). Everyone is thinking communities and how to spread the word through viral marketing. Who isn’t trying to figure out how Facebook might help them? No wonder that Microsoft, at a loss for what to do next, is contemplating acquiring them. With the explosive increase in energy costs, what model of a trade show can hope to survive?

Well, perhaps the Spirit Show typifies that model.

The Spirit Show is an open trade show dedicated to the privately owned recognition product stores. The trade show serves as a showcase for approximately 80-100 exhibitors carrying Greek, Cheer, College, and Recognition products along with a wide variety of complimentary goods and services. The Spirit Show is unique in that the exhibitors are geared to sell directly to the smaller, privately owned stores.

The market, which its participants serve, is made up almost entirely of social media. Sororities and fraternities are some of the earliest examples of communities, and many of them have their online presence in Facebook. You might assume that Greek clothing or Greek gear would be traded entirely online.

Well, it’s always been true that people prefer to buy from people. Buying from an online box store carries with it that unspoken risk. Is this company one I can trust? Meeting face-to-face can set many of these fears to rest. A trade show like the Spirit Show has a very clear niche and its participants go there to buy and sell. The ROI on their activities is much more measurable than for a trade show, where networking is the sole objective. We wish the Spirit Show a long and happy future.

Posts You May Like From The Archives

• September 27, 2005 -- Is Google Getting More Dignified?
• August 24, 2004 -- The Website Ten Commandments
• November 11, 2005 -- World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS)

Spread the word, it’s RSS News Feeds Awareness Day. Although the International Labor Organization may currently be the biggest group celebrating May 1, that could change. Perhaps Daniel Scocco had forgotten about the ILO in coming up with the idea of designating May 1 as RSS Awareness Day. However given that RSS newsfeeds unleash the communicating power of the Internet, the word can spread very fast. I learned about this from the RSS news feed of Andy Beard, who had blogged about it. As we all tell our readers about it, then the momentum becomes unstoppable.

RSS news feeds have been around for many years. It’s the fastest way to be aware of what the BBC or CNN is reporting on. In order to subscribe to the RSS feeds of such favorite sites, all you need is an RSS reader. Here are three web-based and free RSS readers that you can use. All work well and it’s a question of what works best for you:

• Google Reader
• Bloglines
• Newsgator

Once you have your RSS reader working you can just head to your favorite website and subscribe by clicking on the RSS icon.

Courtesy Andy Beard

Another important way of staying on top of breaking news is with Google Blogsearch. It went through a rough spot during recent months but it’s now back functioning well to alert you to Hot News Items. That too is relying on RSS news feeds. All in all, it’s good to be aware of the power of RSS news feeds. If making May 1 RSS News Feeds Awareness Day can help spread the message, then let’s all ping away.

Related: News Feeds Boost Website Traffic

Other Related Posts

• October 20, 2007 -- Google BlogSearch, The Neglected Orphan
• June 30, 2007 -- RSS News Feeds To Stay Alert
• April 28, 2007 -- Yes, The National Gazette Does Have News Feeds

This is the second in a series of articles on how WordPress blogs may be hacked.

Unfortunately it’s becoming a more and more frequent occurrence, even though some seem unaware it has happened. If you have not yet read the first article, Wordpress Blog Hacked, you may find it useful to do so before reading this follow-on article. However it is not required reading.

You may naturally feel that calamities such as your house burning or your blog being hacked only happen to other people. It’s not true and it’s always wise to take precautions. Just imagine returning to your home one evening and finding it in flames. You close your eyes and cannot imagine it’s happening to you. You open them again and it’s all still flames.

How can you recover from such a tragic event. That is why most of us take out insurance and have security alarm systems to prevent such happenings. The more valuable your house, the more you are willing to invest in the right level of protection.

Getting your website hacked can be an equally unwelcome experience. Just see how Anita Campbell describes it in a recent article, Hacked: It Could Never Happen to My Site (Famous Last Words).

On Christmas morning, I tried to open this site as I normally do first thing in the morning, just to do a quick check. The home page of the site was completely blank! Nothing. Nada. I could not post anything new, either. I realized that a cracker had hacked the site. As I investigated later that day I discovered quite a bit of damage to the site.

Imagine seeing that blank screen. It’s as devastating in its own way as all those flames consuming your house. However if you think that is what happens when a site is hacked, you haven’t come up against the latest generation of skillful hackers. You won’t be aware that they have come in and taken over the attic of your house. They may create thousands of parasite webpages on your server without changing the physical appearance of your blog. That is what happened to the two SMM blogs that were hacked two weeks ago.

Eternal Vigilance

The first part of the security plan for your blog must emphasize vigilance. If you’re Al Gore or Matt Cutts, your blog is valuable real estate. Its traffic represents real economic potential to a hacker. Just as for a palatial home, you should invest in significant security systems. However for reasons we will discuss in the third article in the series, even more modest blogs are attractive to hackers. What you must do is to determine what you believe the risk of hacking to be and then invest an appropriate amount of effort in protecting against that.

If your blog is worth hacking, then likely it will be hacked so as to give the maximum time before you detect the intrusion. As will be explained in the next article in this series, hackers may only need access to your website for a few days to gain full value for their efforts. You will notice that Anita Campbell’s blog was hacked on Christmas Day. The two SMM blogs were hacked one Saturday morning. One important lesson is to never leave the blog unattended for too long.

There are two simple ways of checking whether intruders may be ‘in the house’. The first and easiest step is to check the source code of your blog. Just visit the blog and then use the View choice on your browser menu to examine the Source. With Firefox if you prefer you can use < control > U to see the source code in a different window. It may be this will show some lines of code or hyperlinks that should not be there. If you have followed the steps to be described later, then hopefully the code is as you expect it to be. A very rapid way of checking changes in source code is given in the article, Fast Alarm For Hidden WordPress Hackers.

Another way is to examine the traffic to your website. If there is an unexplained and massive increase in the volume, then this may be a sign of trouble. Similar increases in traffic may be seen in other analytic programs such as Google Analytics or SiteMeter. However depending on what hacking has been done, the increased traffic might be hidden from these tools.

To avoid these intrusions, there are certain recommended steps which are described below. As was mentioned in the previous article in this series, the best you can do is to ensure that your blog is as secure as you can make it. There are a host of other blogs that are insecure, and that may be your biggest protection.

Upgrade to the latest version

The most important recommendation that cannot be emphasized enough is to always upgrade to the most stable recent version of WordPress. The WordPress community is very active and as security holes are spotted, then as quickly as possible they are plugged. This does not guarantee that hackers will be kept out. However they may choose to attack earlier version blogs that have easier access holes.

You should also upgrade to the latest version of any plugins that you are using. A plugin may well be written by a single volunteer author so less attention may have been paid to security considerations. You should do a little research on each plugin you intend to use to make sure that others have not had security concerns about it. It is also recommended that you put an empty index.html in the plugins subfolder. This prevents anyone checking that folder and receiving a full display of all the plugins being used.

Harden Your Administration

In addition to working with the latest version of WordPress, there are a number of steps you can take to make hacker intrusions more difficult. The references below explain in greater detail what is involved. Here we summarize only the more important points.

Having user names and passwords that are not easily cracked for access to the blog administration panel is critical. In addition if you have a highly visible blog then you might wish to use the Login LockDown Plugin. This blocks access to the administration panel for a certain period after a small number of incorrect attempts.

You can also restrict access to the admin folder by having an appropriate .htaccess file there. This would specify the IP addresses for those who have rightful access to the folder. This would take the following form:

order deny,allow
deny from all
# whitelist home IP address
allow from 20.20.20.20
# whitelist office IP address
allow from 30.30.30.30

The extent to which you go beyond these steps should be based on your assessment of the risk of being hacked. The references spell out the possibilities.

References:
Hardening WordPress - WordPress Codex
Three tips to protect your WordPress installation - Matt Cutts
5 WordPress Security Essentials - Lee Robertson
How to Protect Your WordPress Site - Anita Campbell
Protecting Your WordPress Blog - Lorelle

The final article in this series is How Wordpress Blogs Are Hacked.

Other Related Posts

• February 19, 2008 -- How Wordpress Blogs Are Hacked
• February 5, 2008 -- Wordpress Blog Hacked
• March 9, 2008 -- Headlines Are For Humans, Titles Are For Robots

In this post, you will find hints on how to stay vigilant so that you will be aware if your blog is hacked. In a subsequent post, I will give some more advanced tips on how to stay vigilant and make your blog more secure. In a final post, I will describe some of the results of such hacking activities.

An underlying realisation in all that is written is that some hackers are extremely knowledgeable and skillful. The best you can do is to ensure that your blog is as secure as you can make it. It then is like the old joke about outrunning the bear. You don’t need to outrun the bear, but only your buddies who are with you. There are a host of other blogs that are insecure, and that may be your biggest protection.

Whose Blogs Get Hacked?

WordPress is quite rightly enormously popular software for writing blogs. As more and more people use it, it becomes a more interesting target for hackers who try to exploit any weaknesses in the software.

It was not surprising to see items such as Wordpress 2.1.1 Dangerous, Upgrade beginning to appear early in 2007. Nor was it difficult to believe that Matt Cutts WordPress Blog had been hacked, when this appeared on April 1, 2007. That was a spoof but since then there have been many real hacking incidents. Al Gore’s blog was, according to Stuart McKeown, as was the WordPress blog of Matt Heaton (Bluehost and Hostmonster CEO). It continues unabated as Stephan Miller and members of the Wordpress Support Forums can testify.

How Will You Know If Your Blog Is Hacked?

The real problem is that you may not realize your blog has been hacked. There may be no visible trace of the hacker’s work. The hacker may wish to boost the search engine visibility of online non-prescription medications or pornographic websites. It is done in such a way that it is hidden from prying eyes.

One useful test is to look at the source code for the blog. In Internet Explorer this can be seen by clicking on View > Source. In Mozilla Firefox, this can be seen via View > Page Source or from the keyboard by pressing U. Sometimes code can be found which has been inserted by the hacker. Another indicator can be very much higher levels of traffic. This will be covered more fully in the next post in this series.

Make Your Blog More Secure

Matt Cutts has given some useful tips to protect a WordPress installation. The most important of these is to ensure you always have the latest and most secure upgrade of WordPress. It is perhaps fitting that this blog post appears when WordPress version 2.3.3 has just been issued. This topic will be covered more fully in a subsequent blog post.

Further Articles in the series:
Guarding Your Wordpress Blog
How Wordpress Blogs Are Hacked

Other Related Posts

• February 19, 2008 -- How Wordpress Blogs Are Hacked
• February 7, 2008 -- Guarding Your Wordpress Blog
• March 9, 2008 -- Headlines Are For Humans, Titles Are For Robots

Many websites will find at least half of their traffic comes because someone has done a Google search. Sometimes it’s even higher than that. So if there is a conflict between what human beings prefer and what search engine robots prefer, which should you favour? This puzzle was graphically illustrated by two blog posts that appeared in the last 48 hours.

Today on the side of the humans, we had perhaps naturally Seth Godin. He was discussing URL Hygiene. He believes URLs are for humans. He particularly likes the advice that is given on Aaron Goldman’s goodURLbadURL website. Here are some key points:

URL Best Practices
Do’s
…
3. Whenever possible, use YourBrandName.com.
…
7. Use subdomains when driving people deeper than your homepage - e.g. Product.YourBrandName.com.

Don’ts
1. Don’t include www. We know to go to the World Wide Web to find you.

The previous day, Matt Cutts of Google had blogged about Subdomains and Subdirectories. In a sense he is speaking for the robots, because Google wants to make sure the robots will see what humans see. His advice yesterday would encourage web designers to use Subdirectories rather than Subdomains. That now goes quite counter to the 7th Do above.

On the much bigger question of whether to WWW or not to WWW, Google does not take a position. The only point they would recommend highly is to be consistent in using one or the other. Using Google Webmaster Tools in fact, you can specify whether you prefer them to index www.mydomain.com or mydomain.com.

The reason why this is important is that if both exist in the Google index, then each will be less visible than if only one of them was indexed. That visibility is created by other websites that have links to the website in question. A summary measure of this is the so-called PageRank. This is a fundamental factor in Google’s algorithm, which ranks Web pages in keyword searches. If both versions (the WWW version and the non-WWW versions) are used indiscriminately, then some links will point to one and other links will point to the other. Standardizing on one ensures the maximum PageRank and thus the maximum visibility in keyword searches for the website.

Which is better, the WWW version or the non-WWW version? If you follow Seth Godin and Aaron Goldman, you’ll go with the human-friendly URL and use the non-WWW version. If you’re trying to be friendly to the robots, that’s a tougher question. It all depends on those webmasters out there who may provide links to your website. The WWW version is much the more popular way of handling URLs so many of those links will point to that version. If you want to make sure that more of them get it right, then you’ll join the WWW camp.

Other Related Posts

• March 9, 2008 -- Headlines Are For Humans, Titles Are For Robots
• December 27, 2007 -- Forget We Ever Mentioned A Supplemental Index - Google
• October 25, 2007 -- Google Tries To Close Pandora’s Box

With more and more people signing on for Gmail, the Chat facility that is available is handy when a telephone is not readily to hand.

As of today, this chat facility can even be used by groups. You can find more on this on the What’s new on Gmail? page.

Just launched! Chat just got better with group chat and new emoticons.

Group chat
Chat with multiple people without multiple windows. Invite your friends to a group discussion. To start a group chat, click ‘Group chat’ from the ‘Options’ menu when chatting.

Posts You May Like From The Archives

• April 19, 2007 -- The Magazine Meme - Thoughts On Being Sociable
• August 21, 2008 -- Search Engine Olympics - a Gold Medal for ?
• October 10, 2006 -- The News Feeds Are Coming

Vinton Cerf, Google’s vice president and chief Internet evangelist, gave a thought-provoking talk in Seoul today. He was talking about the version of the Internet that will be required as we journey in space. This would allow people an ability “to access information and to control experiments taking place far away” from Earth. Expanding into the solar system would bring new rules and regulations too.

He and other experts are working on a set of standards designed to guide space-era Internet communications. He and a team of engineers at the California-based Jet Propulsion Laboratory will complete a key part of the project — establishing standards for space communications like those for Internet — in three years. New standards are needed because of the huge distances and time delays involved in communication across space.

He had some equally intriguing data about the Internet at ground level.

He marvelled at its explosive growth in the last decade, saying it was a trend that would continue. The number of Internet users has grown 20-fold in the past decade to about 1.2 billion people this year, with the number of computer servers rising from 22.5 million to 489 million.

One of the outstanding changes was the Internet’s huge growth in Asia, which now boasts 436 million users, well above the figures of 321 million in Europe and 233 million in North America, the birthplace of the web. So many users in Asia suggests the content of the Internet will eventually contain far more information in languages other than English than it does today.

Although this would all seem to be about faraway places, the other intriguing aspect is that any part of the Internet can be visited with a click of the mouse. The Internet is always present. My own journey across Canada from Montreal to become a resident of Langley B.C. illustrates this on a slightly smaller scale. The journey across Canada, some 4000 miles along the TransCanada Highway, is a great way to experience the incredible diversity and beauty of Canada. We traveled relatively rapidly and our seven-day trip left little time for exploration. British Columbia is a very different province from Québec and there will be many cultural changes involved. Physically there are many obvious differences.

However Internet access at either end of our trip provides an identical experience. It’s the same Internet space. The various SMM (Strategic Marketing Montreal) online properties will continue to function in exactly the same way. In each place, the view of the world is exactly the same. With the Internet there really is no distance between points, even though they may be physically separated by many miles. When Vint Cerf and his team bring outer space onto the Internet, then it also will still be accessible at the click of a mouse.

Posts You May Like From The Archives

• December 6, 2007 -- When I’m Not Doing SEO
• July 21, 2006 -- Microsoft vows to play fair
• January 21, 2007 -- Not BrinBoost - I Should Have Said BrainBoost

 

Wal-mart Sees The Light.

Wal-mart has changed its mindset. Andy Sernovitz sees it as a landmark moment for consumer empowerment and word of mouth. Whichever way you look at it, something very dramatic has happened.

A Mindset can put blinkers on how you see the world. The Internet is having such a disruptive effect on societies, economies and markets that it is important to be aware of all the implications. To be highly effective now it is important to have an Internet Mindset. That involves many factors but one of the most important is to realize that power has shifted from entities like agencies and companies to individuals.

Many will remember that Wal-mart clearly showed its pre-Internet mindset when its PR consultant, Edelman, encouraged the use of blogs that appeared to be created by members of the general public. These were supposed to show Wal-mart in a good light and attempt to reverse some of the adverse publicity that Wal-mart gets from time to time. When the truth came out that these were in fact Wal-mart blogs, Edelman had to do some fast back-pedalling but the damage was done.

Now it would appear that Wal-mart has seen the light. The blinkers have been removed. It is demonstrating that, in the places that matter, an Internet Mindset prevails. Wal-mart has opened up a new website, walmart.com, that actively encourages true dialogue with consumers. After all, you can either be the object of discussion or take part in the discussion. Wal-mart is now providing the infrastructure to support the discussion.

Hopefully when other entities see that even the mightiest acknowledge the new order of things with the Internet, they too will abandon coercive power plays. They are becoming less and less effective and may even blow up in the faces of the perpetrators. The message is clear: Go with the (Internet) Flow!

Related:
For Wal-Mart, PR = Public Revelations
Do You Have An Internet Mindset?

Other Related Posts

• October 8, 2008 -- 6 Reasons Why Companies Tell Customers You’re Not The Boss
• November 1, 2007 -- Is Google Now The Big Ugly?

Coincidences are sometimes amazing. I was really impressed this week by reading a long article about Ray Ozzie, the new chief software architect in Microsoft. That was of course Bill Gates’s title before he left. I found so much of value in that article, The Man Who Would Change Microsoft: Ray Ozzie’s Vision for Connected Software. I rarely like to write a post that just points somewhere else but it would have been worth it.

Then UIE BrainSparks, one of my regular reads, had an item on Conway’s Law. This discussed a longer post by Karl Long, which covers more on Conway’s Law. Conway’s Law was devised in 1968 by Melvin Conway. It reads as follows:

Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization’s communication structure.

That’s exactly the theme that Ray Ozzie was emphasizing in his vision. Particularly as the Mobile Web takes off and we all try to figure out how the Mobile Web and the Desktop Web should interact, Ray Ozzie is raising the right concerns within Microsoft. Google doesn’t have a lock on this expanded cyberspace. Perhaps this is where Microsoft can do an end-run around Google.

Other Related Posts

• May 5, 2008 -- Microsoft should KISS more often
• July 25, 2007 -- Internet Explorer Dilemmas
• January 22, 2007 -- Can Microsoft Catch Google On The Internet .. This Year?

Mark Evans takes the opposite tack in proclaiming that Scoble is wrong. However he suggests that circulation figures show that newspapers are growing. He then seems to spike his own argument by mentioning that this is largely explained by the growth of free newspapers. Doc Searl takes a more helpful line in suggesting a number of different ways the newspapers can avoid their untimely fate.

So often this ongoing conflict is represented as the battle of the journalists versus the bloggers. However I believe there are more fundamental reasons why the newspapers are finding it difficult to move with the times. It’s because newspaper publishers have a long tradition spanning centuries of producing printed newspapers. They’re good at it but they, like many others, assume the Internet is merely an alternative communication channel to transport their wares. Developing an effective website on the Internet is fundamentally different. Here are three principal reasons why newspapers are having problems.

1. Graphic Design is fundamentally different from Web Design. A viewer looking at a printed page is going through a very different experience from a reader looking at a web page. Not the least, he or she is probably willing to look at only 25% of the content that might be acceptable on a printed page.
2. Given that most people find things with Google, Yahoo! or one of the other search engines, an effective website must be search engine visible. Online newspapers are often not set up with this intent.
3. Moving around any website must give a pleasing user experience or the visitor will click away to more welcoming websites. This is what is called Usability and it requires special attention. Trying to mimic the printed version on the Internet will be disastrous.

Any newspaper that can accept this different mindset can develop an effective online presence. In turn this can be supportive of the printed version and may even encourage readership. Only a few newspapers are showing they understand this Digital Divide that must be crossed.

Related:
Can Graphic Designers Do Website Design?
Newspapers Are Dead Scrolls
Newspaper Design Awards And Usability

Tags: newspaper, Internet, usability, graphic+design

Other Related Posts

• May 20, 2008 -- Evaluating Website Design Alternatives - A Counter-Intuitive Approach
• November 8, 2007 -- World Usability Day 2007
• July 30, 2007 -- Sphinn Doctor

Google in the official Googleblog has no problems if that is their desire.

Google has a clear policy of respecting the wishes of content owners. If a newspaper does not want to be part of Google News, we remove their content from our index-all the newspaper has to do is ask. There is no need for legal action and all the associated costs.

However the ‘walled gardens‘ business model has not yet proved its long-term survivability for newspapers. Newspapers are with difficulty finding how best to operate in the open world of the Internet. Professional journalists do not always get it right as Corante points out in “The herd misses opportunities“.

The mainstream media believes that “user-generated content” has to come through their sites, their walled gardens of tightly controlled participation, so they miss the vastly larger opportunity that exists on the Internet as a whole.

It is interesting to speculate on how the traditional media will learn to live most profitably with that larger opportunity.

Related:
Google Loses In Belgium Newspaper Case - review by Danny Sullivan
Walled Gardens - The Walls Keep Tumbling Down - in the Mobile Web

Posts You May Like From The Archives

• February 19, 2005 -- The Canute Business Blogging Barometer
• April 3, 2005 -- The Long Tail Principle
• February 1, 2005 -- Massive advertising for a free product - MSN Search

News feeds from the major news providers have been available for many years. These alert those who check such news feeds that new items are available. For example the BBC has a good explanation of news feeds and of the news feeds they provide for all their news channels. With a news feed aggregator such as Google Reader or Bloglines anyone can stay in touch with breaking news from a whole variety of sources.

Most blogging software arranges automatically that as new posts are made to a blog a news feed is updated to show the latest entry. So it is also possible to be aware of new items of interest on the blogosphere. Even though blogs are now taking new formats such as plogs and slogs the news feed is always available to alert the world to news.

Traditional newspapers as they see the impact that the Internet is having on readership are also joining the news feed movement. They set up online editions and anyone can subscribe to the associated news feed to stay in touch. That would seem to be the dominant trend now.

Except that this week, a new online newspaper came on the scene and as of this date it has no news feed. It’s called the National Gazette and would seem to be an interesting new vehicle.

Here is how they explain what it is all about:

The National Gazette is an American newspaper written by and for the millennial generation, those born roughly in the last two decades of the 20th century. It was created by “millennials” who felt that even in the massive modern media landscape, the values of our generation were not being represented in the media. It is published solely over the Internet by a decentralized network of writers, editors, and photographers. The network is open to any millennial with something meaningful to share.

I only became aware of this new newspaper through a news feed (XML file) put out by one of those involved in its creation, Cameron Moll. That news feed is somewhat unusual since it is associated with a web page rather than a blog. Cameron Moll calls it his Premium Linkage web page and it has some really good links on it. It is a shining example of the principle that to stay in touch with news items the most effective way is to watch those news feeds. Perhaps the National Gazette will follow the trend.

Related: News Feeds Boost Website Traffic

Update: Yes, The National Gazette Does Have News Feeds - see comment below.

Other Related Posts

• April 28, 2007 -- Yes, The National Gazette Does Have News Feeds
• May 1, 2008 -- RSS News Feeds Awareness Day, May 1
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The Dallas Morning News wants to cut 85 positions through buyouts as it prepares for a restructuring this fall. The Plain Dealer in Cleveland said buyouts were coming. In July, the Chicago Tribune said it would cut 120 jobs and The New York Times Co. said it would cut about 250 jobs in its printing operations.

The Founder in Threadwatch said he was surprised since “this process has been moving along since the mid 1990’s .. and just now the newspapers are realizing that everyone is reading their news online, and mostly at news sites such as news.google.com , drudgereport or huffingtonpost depending on their political views.” Some are going online but with apparent reluctance since they seem not to have figured out how to monetize them in the same way they have handled the printed pages.

Tags: online, newspapers

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“The internet has the extraordinary capacity to allow anyone, anywhere, to develop software, and to instantly distribute it, without cost, throughout the world. StopBadware.org was established in an effort to preserve this positive ability to generate and share information by exploring ways to solve the badware problem.”

There are many solutions that provide safety ratings for sites. One of the most popular is McAfee SiteAdvisor, a plug-in for Internet Explorer and Firefox. When you search with Google, SiteAdvisor displays different colors (green, yellow, red) next to search results and ads to show if the site sends spam, has malware, pop-ups, or links to dubious sites.

Tip of the hat: Joe Dolson

Tags: Google, malware

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The Long Tail is the easier concept to understand. It’s a term developed by Chris Anderson and his book explaining it all will be on sale within 10 days. His theme is that many markets are not mass markets with everyone having somewhat similar needs and wants. Instead a good part of a given market may be made up of people with very dissimilar tastes. What seems like a single market may be made up of a multitude of micro niches with very different people seeking very different things. The beauty of the Internet is that a person in such a micro niche can still possibly find a supplier given the way search engines such as Google work. Very different searches can still wind up at the same place, where the supplier is. So the Internet can be seen as a space where connections can be made.

Open Space would seem to be very different. It was an approach invented by Harrison Owen in 1985. A large group of people meet at a physical location and with the minimum of structure try to explore complex issues and see what develops. Others are now providing help for this process. For example OpenSpaceWorld.org offers the following:

Open Space Technology is a simple way to run productive meetings, for five to 2000+ people, and is a powerful way to lead any kind of organization, in everyday practice and ongoing change.

You can even meet up with other practitioners in particular fields and use the Open Space approach. For example Identity Open Space will take place on July 20/21 in Vancouver to explore the notion of Internet Identity. If you all prefer not to travel to the same physical location, then Change Facilitator Gabriela Ender and her team from Germany has developed an Internet real-time methodology OpenSpace-Online®, which they say promotes autonomous, responsible, respectful, and results-oriented collaboration, while overcoming the limitations of time and space, and at the same time saving on travel costs. That seems to be the way the concept is going with software to provide technological support. One powerful technique here is the use of a Wiki, which can allow a group to develop and refine a body of knowledge.

That would seem to be moving away from the simplicity of the original Open Space approach. It was really very low-tech and relied on the natural tendency of people to get together with others with similar interests and see what emerges. In an Open Space process, a subgroup may wander together that wants to handle a particular aspect of the problem and away the discussion goes. Others see the subgroup and wander over to see what it’s all about. Perhaps it’s not for them so they wander on to another subgroup until they find something that strikes their fancy.

A new kind of very simple support for that ‘getting together’ process is now available. It allows different people in the long tail to come together and see where it goes. For example microbreweries or craft beers are often quoted as very typical examples of long tail products. Zimbio is a network of public portals that have been created by whoever wishes to do so. So one has sprung up on craft beer for example. A similar framework for creating and sharing platforms for social groups is grou.ps. These platforms are very appropriate in applying the original Open Space concept. If you’re dealing with long tail products, you may well want to consider how these new-style Open Space online groups may help in the diffusion of ideas process.

Tags: The Long Tail, Open space

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There has been an enormous amount of ink used on these matters during the last two weeks. Here are a few items that will help you understand what is going on:
The Struggle for Net Freedom
House rejects Net neutrality rules
The Day the Wild, Carefree and Sexy Internet Died

It’s a complex issue and it’s tough to stand back and get the big picture. However this would seem to push the USA down a different road from that the US Administration was following back last November. Then Condoleezza Rice was supporting the choice of a US private corporation, ICANN, as the defender of Internet universality. Here is a quote from a letter of support she wrote then:

The Internet has become an essential infrastructure for global communications, including for global trade and commerce, and therefore we firmly believe that support for the present structures for Internet governance is vital. These structures have proven to be a reliable foundation for the robust growth of the Internet we have seen over the course of the last decade.

If the US Congress has its way, then it is unlikely the world will accept that ICANN should continue to be the preserver of global net neutrality.

Related: Condoleezza Rice Supports Internet Grassroots Activities

Tags: Net Neutrality, US Government, ICANN

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Summary: The fads and big deals that get the press coverage are not important for running a workhorse website. To serve your customers, it’s far better to emphasize simplicity and quality than to chase buzzwords.

Well he has a point, although nice guys often finish last. You’ve got to do enough to stand out from the crowd. That takes the right kind of HYPE and perhaps it’s time for the word to evolve a little. The Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary perhaps indicates how the word has evolved in the past in the order it gives the four definitions it has for HYPE.

• noun (Etymology: by shortening & alteration from hypodermic) 1 slang : a narcotics addict; 2 slang : HYPODERMIC
• transitive verb 1 : STIMULATE, ENLIVEN — usually used with up; 2 : INCREASE
• transitive verb 1 : PUT ON, DECEIVE; 2 : to promote or publicize extravagantly
• noun 1 : DECEPTION, PUT-ON; 2 : PUBLICITY; especially : promotional publicity of an extravagant or contrived kind

Although this might suggest that the word HYPE comes from the prefix, hypo, it seems more likely it really relates to the prefix, hyper. We can see the following definitions in a Dictionary of Medical Terms.

hyper-: Means high, beyond, excessive, above normal. For example, hypercalcemia is high calcium in the blood and hypersensitivity is oversensitivity. The opposite of hyper- is hypo-.
hypo-: Prefix meaning low, under, beneath, down, below normal. For example, hypocalcemia is low calcium in the blood and hyposensitivity is undersensitivity. The opposite of hypo- is hyper-.

Currently HYPE has a negative connotation, certainly to Jakob Nielsen. Perhaps it’s better to begin to associate it with another positive hyper word, hyperlinks. Here’s an idea for the title of your next article, Jakob. Hyperlinked Web Stories Are ... However you finish that title, I’m sure you’ll have a winner.

Tag: hype, hyperlink

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