Web

The arrival of martech was heralded as the next stage of marketing. These platforms enabled marketers to gather endless reams of data so they could reconfigure their approach and boost their conversions. The theory was that the better businesses got to know their customers, the more appealing they could make their offers. What actually happened […]

Every year, website design and user interface change slightly; 2018 is no different, with trends emerging in design, typography, and colors. To design a website that can compete with the millions of other similar websites out there, it is important to be aware of the newest styles and most popular methods. Here are some of […]

These summary posts are designed to be a ‘quick fix’ of the top Web news, for
those people who don’t have time to read the full articles but who want to stay
informed.
– Internet
Boom in China Is Built on Virtual Fun; NY Times continues the western
fascination with all things China. This article profiles Tencent and their
dominant mobile…

Interesting notion of “feed grazing” from James Corbett and Danny Ayers. James actually came up with the concept – this explanation is from a comment he left on Danny’s blog:

“I‚Äôm actually coming to the conclusion that the whole subscriptions mindset is a problem and that in future we‚Äôll ‚Äògraze‚Äô for the most part instead of…

There’s no getting around it: the way marketers and retailers harness the power of big data can be a little on the creepy side. An innocent Google search on a specific subject can often result in you seeing nothing but targeted ads on that subject for the rest of the week wherever you turn.  Yet […]

You may think your internet usage is completely private, but any time you access a website, sign up for an account, purchase a product, post a message, or browse search engine results, you’re sharing something about yourself.  If you find this troubling, you may want to learn more about how you can delete your internet […]

UX design – the process of creating a website that is intuitive to the user – is ongoing and must adjust to the needs of your market and users. While you may feel like dropping the mic after getting your site up and running, it’s not over and done. As users and the digital landscape […]

Participatory design is a method to bring customers into the design process through a collaborative approach. In web design, consumers work directly with experts to create user-friendly interfaces and designs to better improve the user experience. The traditional method of the design included only professional developers working to design what he or she believed met […]

Savvy business owners understand the importance of intellectual property (IP) to their business’ success and most can name patents, trademarks, and copyrights as some of the various forms that IP can take. But the distinctions between copyrights, patents, and trademarks is often confusing and misunderstood, even by business people that regularly deal with IP. But not […]

Every time you’ve installed a piece of commercial software, you’ve invariably been presented with what must have appeared to be legal gibberish- a seeming difficult to read, needlessly long, solid block of text that was almost impossible to understand. Most people never bother to read the information presented- quickly scrolling to the bottom of the […]

As a startup one of your most important assets is your brand and that brand is usually embodied in your company name and logo. The valuable time that you invested in coming up with just the right creative name and developing the branding and marketing around that company name is impossible to measure. After creating […]

Congratulations on eyeing the international market for your business growth. We are living in an age of globalization and more and more companies are recognizing the profitability of taking their products and service offerings globally at a relatively small incremental cost. It is an easy calculus to recognize that international consumers are able to be […]

When British technologist Kevin Ashton coined the term “Internet of Things” in 1999, little did he knew that this term would become so popular in the coming years. Now, we are living in the age where IoT is already a reality. It has been estimated that by 2020 around 50 billion IoT-enabled devices will be […]

In the recent years in the digital medium, the latest cutting-edge trends in web design has seen far more shifts and changes in technology and its use — as compared to the traditional print. Eighteen years into this new millennium there is no surprise that there it is still evolving posing a challenge to the web […]

This week on Read/WriteTalk I had the opportunity to talk to Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter. One of the more interesting topics in the podcast was the open platform that Twitter has developed. We also discussed how the team came up with the idea for Twitter, different catalysts over the past year for user growth, and even how they came up with…

Video marketing is here to stay. It’s a $135 billion industry in the U.S. alone, and consumers are increasingly expecting to see videos from brands they follow and brands they might be interested in. If you aren’t providing that sought after video content, chances are you aren’t being sought out at all. Keep in mind […]

27,563 words. Here’s the latest (ch. 34 onwards). I’m hoping to reach the 30,000 mark by end of tomorrow. That will give me a nice round figure to aim for of 10,000 words per week for the final two weeks. I’m enjoying having two storylines intertwining now. On the one hand, Declan Atomz is now beginning to understand the alien world. It’ll be…

Over the past 20-plus years, digital marketplaces have fundamentally transformed commerce and consumer expectations around the world. But although names like Amazon and Uber have become household names at this point, the evolution of and disruption caused by digital marketplaces is far from over. In 1995, eBay launched the mainstream digital marketplace movement with its […]

Many own or manage a small to mid-sized business website (SMB). These websites are showcasing your products or services and are only one small component of reaching your intended audience. Improving conversion rates. To reach your audience and generate leads — means to increase your return on investment (ROI). There are a variety of customer […]

I’ve been thinking about starting a linkblog, like Phil Pearson has just done. Two of my favourite daily reads are Anil Dash’s Daily Links and Erik Benson’s Morale-o-Meter. Both those guys post a daily list of external links, with a 1-2 line comment on each link, which pretty much align with my own interests. Personally I prefer it when daily links…

2003 has so far been a year of hype for weblogs and k-logs. Blogging is on the cusp of the mainstream. Or is it? A few posts recently have me wondering: why would normal people want to publish to the Web? Mark Pilgrim: “… itís possible that an unfiltered… unedited… personal publishing system… with instantaneous worldwide…

CSS and XHTML are still dominating my mind’s attention.xml file. As you can see in my menu, they’re numbers 1 and 2 in my Weekly Topic Top 10. btw the Topic Top 10 is going to be a weekly record (pardon the pun) of the most popular topics on my mind. I’ve actually created some XML files to store each week’s top 10, so I can track what topics are…

I’ve been totally absorbed in my CSS re-design this past week. I did some final tinkering tonight, trying to find a solution to the “bottom horizontal bar” issue (outlined in my previous post). But CSS positioning is an abstract thing to get ones head around. It’s not like good old fashioned HTML table designs, where you can set the table borders…

I’ve been fixing up some teething problems with my new CSS design and I’m quite pleased to report that my homepage is now 100% valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional! I checked this at the W3C Validator. A couple of days ago I had about 360 errors on my test page, but I whittled it down in two main ways. Firstly, I ran all my homepage posts through a nice…

I’ve done a re-design of my Radio weblog, using CSS. Look ma, no tables! Yes, it’s now a tableless design. I’m doing my bit for the web standards cause, although I haven’t yet achieved 100% XHTML validation. For my re-design I used a CSS Zen Garden design by Michael Landis, who kindly gave me permission to use it. I figured the best way to get…

Forgive me, it’s the end of the day and I don’t want to write my usual lengthy blog post. So I thought I’d do the blogging equivalent of “piano pieces”, which in this case is a collection of various links and quotes that have caught my eye recently: Prelude No. 15 in D flat Op. 28 “Prior Art” (Ray Ozzie): “In 1993 or thereabouts, we saw the…

Matt Webb blogged the Hypertext03 conference and the resulting notes are a good scan. Thank goodness for people like Matt who blog conferences, because those of us who live on the other side of the world don’t get to go to these flash harry conferences *sulk*. Matt’s notes on Ted Nelson’s speech were especially interesting. Ted Nelson is a legend…

On a less serious note than my previous post, it also occured to me that bloggers are like rock n roll bands. The best bands explore a different theme each album, just like the best bloggers (imho) write on an ever-changing series of themes. My favourite band The Velvet Underground released 4 studio albums that were each different in style and…

As per my previous post, I’ve updated my blogroll to include topics and conversations. I just manually updated my blogroll OPML file, but I envisage a web frontend for this in future – kinda like Phil Pearson’s web form for his Feed Combiner. A bit more about the two new sections in my blogroll. The Topics section is made up of links to K-Collector…

Don also mentioned auto-population of blogrolls, which is something that Phil Pearson has been experimenting with and I’ve been commenting on. My view is that the “blogroll” can be extended to incorporate not only links to weblogs (people), but links to topics and conversations (weblog comments). Later on you could add other chunks of microcontent…

A few days ago John Robb complained about his Google PageRank being zero after he moved to his new domain. I was in the same situation, but this morning I noticed my weblog has a new Google PageRank of 5/10. I see John Robb’s PageRank is back too (6/10). Another new blogger who had 0/10 PageRank up till today is Adam Bosworth (a former…

Dave Winer, on political campaign blogging: “The first candidate that helps voters publish their own stories and ideas and drive the campaign is the one who really captures the energy of the Web.” I agree, the essence of the Two-Way Web is that everyone has the right to publish. That could almost be “the lost amendment” of the…

Today, August 25, is Elvis Costello’s birthday. It’s also my birthday 🙂 Co-incidentally, we also share the same surname. Elvis Costello’s real name is Declan MacManus. How cool is that! That’s why I affectionately refer to him as Uncle Elvis. Hey, maybe I’m the Elvis Costello of Weblogging… only less cruel 🙂 No, better to be my own…

Actually in New Zealand, we don’t have “grade schools” (they’re called Primary and Secondary schools here). But I wanted to subtly reference Jon Udell’s influential article called “Grade School CMS”. i.e. I’m just being a smart ass 🙂 Things I want to do with my weblog: 1. Contribute formal articles on the subject of the Two-Way Web. I’m still…

A little while ago I wrote on the topic of “Smart Clients”, a Microsoft catchphrase for non-browser-based web applications. In my article I mentioned an interesting browser-based RSS News Aggregator being built by Lucmo. Today I read the following post in the Lucmo weblog: “The Read/Write Web blog writes that Lucmo is in “beta” — that’s not…

Whenever I read about the Semantic Web, I am reminded of Herman Melville’s classic novel Moby Dick. One of my favourite chapters of Moby Dick is chapter 42: The Whiteness of the Whale. Here’s an excerpt: “Aside from those more obvious considerations touching Moby Dick, which could not but occasionally awaken in any man’s soul some alarm, there was…

Excellent, I now have Radio Userland’s Trackback enabled. There have been some interesting suggestions for other new Radio features too, so hopefully some of those ideas will get implemented soon. I especially like the idea of modular templates, suggested by John Robb.

Dave Winer says there are 2 ways to approach XML: “…people who think of XML as a programming space, and people who think of it as a literary space.” The first group “love XML for its technical intricacy”. The literary people however “use XML because it is a convenient way to move info between apps”. XML-as-literature is a romantic notion. While…

I have moved to a new domain name. Please update your records: New weblog address: http://www.readwriteweb.com New RSS feed: http://www.readwriteweb.com/rss.xml ps the reason I am re-posting this, and my XML as Literature story below, is that my PC crashed tonight and I lost some of my recent posts. Not to mention MS Outlook data and other…