Cup of Joe: You Aren’t a Drunk Monkey, So Don’t Act Like One!
The other day I clicked a link on Twitter to a blog post everyone was talking about. I did like everyone else and read the post and then left a snarky comment. But then unlike most everyone else, I right clicked the margin and selected “view source”. Why did I do that? I am not really sure, I honestly did it without thinking. Looking at other people’s code has become something of a habit for me. I find myself sometimes getting more out of analyzing the blog’s HTML, than the post itself!
Anyways, on this particular site I was shocked when I saw the HTML. It was horrible. I mean it was really really bad. It looked like this site was coded by a drunk monkey in 1998! And, to be honest, it really got my angry. Angry? Yes, angry! You see this site isn’t just any site, this site happens to be the corporate web site for a very recognizable brand. This company is known for their excellence in their industry. Furthermore I know a few of the folks that work for this company, and they are all really awesome people that do good work and believe in what they do. And because of that, it mad me angry that their site is so haphazardly put together. It made me angry that a company that I believed in, wasn’t taking my profession seriously.
The folks that I know that work for this company deserve better, they deserve the best site money can buy, and trust me, this company can afford it. So I started asking myself, why? Why would a company that has earned so much respect, developed such a strong brand, and have such awesome employees, have such a horrible site?
I ask myself these types of questions a lot, because unfortunately the story above isn’t uncommon. There are many good companies with strong brands that don’t care enough to build a good web site. And, I will freely admit that I have extremely high standards when it comes to web development.
So why does this matter? Why should these companies care what a geeky code monkey thinks? They should care, because I am not alone! They should care because as leaders in their industries people look to them to set the standard. They should care because their competitors know they can do better and are prepared to prove it. But most importantly, they should care because their clients and customers expect the best in everything they do, and if they find out the truth, then they can find another company to do business with very quickly.
And no I am not naming names, but if you think this post is about your company, get in touch with me and I would be happy to give you a free site audit.
Anchor Weighs in on Click Fraud
I. Am. Hilarious. Anchor Intelligence has just released its Q3 09 click fraud data—and it’s down, contrary to what Click Forensics reported for the same period. Anchor saw worldwide click fraud drop almost four percentage points from Q2, to 23.2% of all clicks in Q3.
Interestingly, Anchor found that malicious, “attempted” click fraud had fallen off in this period—dropping from 22.9% of all clicks in Q2 to only 18.6% of all clicks in Q3. Accidental, “innocuous” click fraud rose slightly (0.4 percentage points) to 4.6%. (Anchor measure all attempts at click fraud, not just charged clicks. The labels they use reflect the motivation behind the attempts.) They also noted some geographic shifts in click fraud:
Search Engine Watch says that Anchor also observed click fraudsters getting more creative:
Anchor Intelligence says it did observe more sophisticated click fraud schemes in the third quarter, such as browser hijacking. They also saw an increase in the threats of malicious advertisements in paid search and ads on publisher websites.
Although Anchor’s findings contradict Click Forensics’, CF finds a lower rate of click fraud on the rise (12.7% in Q2 to 14.1% in Q3).
What do you think? Is Click Forensics’ more pessimistic report right, or does Anchor Networks more accurately reflect the state of the industry?
Facebook Changes Privacy Policy
Two months ago, Facebook responded to Canada’s inquiry into the privacy practices of the most popular social network in the world. The (somewhat surprising) result was Facebook changing the way that third-party apps could access users’ personal information and how long they retained user data.
And now those changes are going live. With the info in clear, non-legalese language in the privacy section of the site, Facebook is giving users 7 days to comment on the new policies.
The major changes include “how users can delete their profiles, how long ‘backup copies’ of personal data get stored, and how some of their new data partnerships with companies like Nielsen might impact the ads users see.”
Also this week, Facebook announced changes to apps and APIs. Perhaps most interesting of all, Facebook will also soon offer an API to make any web page into a “Fan” page. The “Open Graph” API will make it so that website visitors can become fans of any participating web page and add it to their news feed.
For developers, MediaPost reports:
Facebook will enable developers to ask for users’ primary email address within applications to facilitate direct contact. At the same time, developers will only be able to send notifications and invitations via email, a user’s Facebook Inbox or the News Feed and other activity streams.
New application and games dashboards are slated for the home page, making it easier for people to see the latest apps they have used as well as discovering new ones based on what friends are engaging in.
Meanwhile, Facebook is ending its verified app program, instead extending the standards from the program to all apps.
Developers aren’t the only ones affected by Facebook’s moves this week. Advertisers and users will be, too. Advertisers should be pleased with the privacy changes, as will bing, according to paidContent’s Tameka Kee:
Elliot Schrage, Facebook’s VP of communications and public policy, explained that the company wants to offer advertisers better conversion tracking; this means the company will need to share more than just the thumbs up vs. thumbs down and standard click-through stats it currently offers advertisers. While the company will anonymize any user data it shares with advertisers, the new policy informs users that they can opt-out of being cookied.
Other changes include the notification that users who set their profiles as viewable to “Everyone” will have that data crawled by the search engines—this includes their wall posts and news feeds—likely as a result of the new data-sharing deal with Microsoft’s Bing.
What do you think? Will you be commenting on the new privacy or other changes in the works? Will these help Facebook in its quest for monetization, or just help with user loyalty?
Washington Post Co. Posts a 69% Increase in Profits
I am still rubbing my eyes to see if this is one of those sleep-deprived, delusional, mirage type things that can play tricks with you. Nope, it’s real but you don’t need to peel back too many layers on this one to see that the newspaper side of the Washington Post Co.’s business is actually keeping that number lower. At least you can think that the paper can be propped up by the other media holdings for the time being.
In a bit of irony it’s the New York Times that reports
The company, which owns Newsweek magazine, Kaplan education services and television properties along with its namesake newspaper, said Friday it earned $17.1 million, or $1.81 per share. That compares with net income of $10.1 million, or $1.08 per share, in the same period a year earlier.
Revenue climbed 2 percent to $1.15 billion.
The newspaper division, which includes the Post, The Daily Herald in Everett, Wash., and dozens of local weeklies, whittled its operating losses through buyouts and cost-cutting to $23.6 million, down from $82.7 million a year ago.
So at least the Washington Post newspaper is cutting back on its losses. That’s good in a backwards kinda way isn’t it? This ‘positive’ movement did happen despite a steeper than expected 28% decrease in advertising revenue for the quarter. Industry wide the news continues to play like a cheap Halloween horror movie with the carnage still happening at a rapid pace and no real end in site for the grisly results.
The Post’s decline was comparable to what has been reported by other big publishers — which also have managed to improve earnings by cutting labor and other expenses. The New York Times Co.’s advertising revenue plunged 27 percent in the most recent quarter. Ad revenue in Gannett Co.’s publishing division, which includes USA Today and more than 80 other newspapers, dropped 28 percent.
So it looks like the best way to survive as a newspaper is to be part of a company that is diversified. If you are a newspaper only organization or the dependence on revenue is heavily weighted toward newspaper holdings the news is still grim. In a near throwaway line fro the Times, the story gets even darker since the idea that being online as a newspaper will ensure survival is not a sure thing at all.
The Post Co.’s newspaper Web revenue, which comes mainly from Washingtonpost.com, also stalled. It fell 18 percent after showing a 9 percent decline in the previous quarter.
They call that a stall? I call it a call for the lifeboats. Two consecutive quarters of a shrinking economy defines a recession so this indicator is that even the online side of the newspaper business is not going well at all. If that goes south as well as the print editions then what else is there? Nothing.
Well, I like reading a paper in the right circumstances as much as the next guy but I wonder when the day comes that there won’t be one to buy and read?
Any fortune tellers out there? Gotta a date for the end of the newspaper era?
Google Feeds Its Spiders
Just in time for Halloween, Google has given us a chance to put together a very timely and pithy headline (although I have to give credit where credit is due – hat tip to Andy). So how exactly is Google doing this and what the heck does it mean? In a nutshell, it’s a way to move toward a kind of ‘simulated’ real time search because the idea is to use its RSS/Atom feeds to identify and index new content more quickly. Is this replacing the traditional crawling technique of forever? There is no consensus on this aspect but it is obvious that Google is fully on board the real-time search train that is leaving the station as we speak.
According to a post on Google’s Webmaster Central blog, Google is now discovering web sites by automatically scanning RSS and Atom feeds. This new process will help Google more quickly identify web pages and will allow users to find new content in search results as soon as it goes live. While not exactly “real-time,” using feeds to identify updates to websites is an arguably faster method than the traditional crawling techniques Google has used in the past. And Google may get even faster in the near future – the post also notes that the company may soon explore using mechanisms like the real-time protocol PubSubHubbub to identify updated items going forward.
This is pretty nifty. Of course, the obvious question is how do you rank these new entries into whatever keyword clustered group the page belongs in? Just because they are the newest or freshest entries into a space by no means determines their relevancy and quality.
In fact, one could argue that real time could be a real pain in the butt because it could simply end up meaning that whoever is first is best. That’s not a good result. It’s kinda like saying that the kid in school who runs the 100 yard dash the fastest get the prize for Best Science Project. There is no correlation between speed and quality. It happens on occasion but it is more rare than one might think. Real time may be more suited for news and not for research. It’s too early to tell but these are questions that will be cropping up regularly moving forward.
The bottom line is that Google is going to be using all of its considerable resources to try to harness the new push to real time results. Once everything is gathered however then the fun really begins.
If I could be so bold as to make a suggestion I would like to see a “real time” search option and “traditional” one. I’m not sure there will be a real clean way to present real time results with those that are actually the best result without making the SERP’s a complete usability train wreck.
What are your thoughts on this one?
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Are There a Lot of Dumb People Using Google?
Google is always testing and tweaking its search interface. More recently, the search engine has tested a minimalist homepage design.
Well, apparently that homepage might be a little too simple for the search-challenged, as the latest version adds the rather obvious “Press Enter to Search” text.
I know that I’m not representative of the average search user, but I’m shocked that the average user might not know to simply click “enter” in the absence of any “search” button.
Let this be a reminder to all web site owners. If the most popular–and easiest to use–web site in the world has to point out the obvious, you shouldn’t take for granted that your visitors will know how to use your site.
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I Vant To Suck Your Bing
Here’s a post for a relatively slow Friday afternoon: two ads for Bing that vaguely tie in with Halloween. Halloween is generally speaking a children’s holiday. So first comes a “Bing Goes the Internet” video featuring elementary school children. Years from now this may qualify as a pop-culture nostalgia moment:
And then a more sophisticated and [...]
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Bing Adds NFL, Flight Information To Mobile Browser
Bing has announced a couple additions to its mobile browser today: expanded NFL information and airline flight status reports.
The NFL feature works by typing in a team or player’s name, and provides stats, scores, and schedule details. Bing also says you’ll get “eal-time updates on the plays” while a game is being played.
The flight status [...]
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Despite PageRank Dropping In Webmaster Tools, Google Pushes Toolbar PageRank Update
Fifteen-days ago, Google dropped PageRank values from Webmaster Tools and the search community took that as a bold statement. The statement was clear, webmasters “shouldn’t focus on PageRank so much,” said Google.
Last night, Google pushed out a Google Toolbar PageRank update, despite making that bold statement just a couple weeks ago. As Danny [...]
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Outside.in Expands Its Hyperlocal Search Capabilities
While real-time search gets all the attention these days, there’s also increased interest in hyperlocal search. Where real-time search answers What’s happening right now?, hyperlocal search answers the question, What’s happening right here? It’s like local search on steroids, you could say.
Outside.in has, for several years, been somewhat like a clearinghouse of hyperlocal information and [...]
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