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 become very interested in the “Universal Canvas”, a term popularized by Microsoft and subsequently analyzed by Jon Udell. First of all, here are two definitions of the Universal Canvas: a) From a Microsoft White Paper dated June 2000, entitled Microsoft .NET: Realizing the Next Generation Internet: “The universal canvas builds upon XML…

Asterisk: “…the one thing every Web professional needs, regardless of their main job function, be that IA, Design, Development, what-have-you is adaptability. You know, the ability to wing it.” In New Zealand we have a similar concept called No. 8 Wire mentality, or “kiwi ingenuity” – based on the architypal New Zealand farmer…

RWW Word of the Day: triangulation Dave Winer (via Denise Howell’s weblog): “…Question about journalism always having to be the sophisticated big stuff? Dave says know (sic), importance of triangulation, getting news on an event from many sources.”

Ever listen to The Velvet Underground’s 9 minute live version of ‘What goes on’, from their 1969 Live album Volume 1? The first couple of minutes feature Lou Reed singing verse and chorus. The rest of the song is an extended instrumental and this is where it gets interesting. Each of the 4 instruments has a unique voice, but by…

I read with interest Jon Udell’s OSCOM keynote slides. The main subject is how to write the web “in a rich way” – and by “rich” he means semantic. Udell talks about there being a lack of easy-to-use XML writing tools for the Web. Weblog tools are user-friendly and they are the killer app for web writing, but they lack the ability to create…

I’ve installed the W3C web browser/editor, Amaya, onto my PC. I’ve only just begun to test it. But with all this talk about Microsoft abandoning its IE browser, it may pay to actively look at alternative browsers. This article at freshmeat.net has a good write-up on lightweight browsers, including Amaya.

My first post to k-collector!

A hot topic in the blogging world recently has been: is Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser dead? Ironically, most of the good stuff to read has been via “Comments” forms – ie readers writing back to a weblog post. Robert Scoble from Microsoft said “The right question is: ‘is the Web dead in Longhorn?’ ” and he got over 30…

After a few late nights, I’ve successfully implemented Easy News Topics (ENT) tags to my Radio Userland RSS feed. It wasn’t as easy as I thought it would be. It involved rooting around in the Radio.root file of my weblog and upskilling myself in UserTalk, Radio Userland’s scripting language. But mostly I stood on the shoulders of giants to get this…

D. Keith Robinson has written an interesting article about the future of Intranets. He writes: “…a company’s Intranet would be better served as more of an enterprise-wide, network-enabled application than anything resembling a Web site or Web application.” It seems likely that content management systems will over time integrate with office…

I posted a question onto the Radio Userland discussion list. I asked why updates to my OPML blogroll don’t automatically update my weblog menu. Nobody had an answer. A Google search came up empty too. But from my own checks it does seem that when you update your blogroll.opml file in your Gems folder, the ompl file itself…

I’ve been re-reading Weaving the Web by Tim Berners-Lee. As inventer of the World Wide Web in 1990 and current director of the W3C, Berners-Lee is a visionary and innovator. His current obsession, the Semantic Web, is not yet widely understood or appreciated. Just like the Web 10 years ago.  Indeed one of Berners-Lee’s…

There appears to be a problem upstreaming changes to my opml blogroll. The XML file updates, but the blogroll on my menu doesn’t. I got around this by manually deleting the blogroll from my homepage template, publishing, then adding the blogroll back in – i.e. in a roundabout way I re-published the blogroll in my menu.

Wouldn’t you know it, I came across a Userland macro today that lists recent titled blog posts. Where was this macro when I needed it yesterday? 🙂 Anyway, I’m playing around with this macro now. Still getting used to Radio Userland’s dev environment… …Got this working OK and I now have my 10 most recent entries displayed in my menu…

Tonight I added an OPML blogroll to my menu – easy thanks to Jake Savin’s instructions. Then I set about trying to implement a “Last 10 Entries” script into my weblog menu. Because I tend to write long-ish articles, I’d like to have a dynamic menu that lists my 10 most recent articles. I looked around the web for a feature like this, but found that…

In his article “Google Aggregation Strategy”, Elwyn Jenkins from Microdot News reviews three Google “information aggregations” and asks which one will be moved from beta to live first – Blogger, Froogle or Google News. Microdot News argues that aggregation is at the heart of Google’s business and…

Dave Winer: “Much weblog writing is functional, not artistic. Jon Udell…writes about SpiderPhone because he wants to tell you about a piece of technology that interests him. The writing helps him sort it out, even if no one were to read it.” One of my goals in my weblog is to write original articles, rather than simply link to lots of other…

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, or Rich Site Summary, depending on who you listen to. Either way RSS has become the poster child for the Publish-Subscribe protocol. RSS allows weblog and website owners to syndicate their content to anyone who wishes to subscribe to it. Usually people subscribe to “RSS feeds” via an aggregator. Some…

I discovered today a site called WriteTheWeb, which is “a community news site dedicated to encouraging the development of the read/write web”. Like me they believe the Read/Write Web “doesn’t just mean writing words, it means any time the web experience becomes two-way.” This is an important point, because a lot of people have no desire…

The World Wide Web in 2003 is beginning to fulfil the hopes that Tim Berners-Lee had for it over 10 years ago when he created it. The web was never just supposed to be a one-way publishing system, but the first decade of the web has been dominated by a tool which has been read-only – the web browser. The goal now is to convert the…