Archive for July, 2006
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Mavens wanted
We are in the midst of developing a web 2.0 site for a client. You’re probably wondering what that is (unless you’re a complete tech geek). Well, it’s basically a site with lots of social elements and technologies that focus on interaction, collaboration and sharing of information - Phew!).
It’s one of the first projects that I’m involved in since I started working for Precedent, and by now it has become crystal clear that an in depth understanding of the people who use the site is essential (who could have guessed?). But what may be of even greater importance in this case (and probably for most sites that rely on their visitors for content) is to develop an understanding of the people who actively interact and submit content. This is important because the entire concept for most web 2.0 sites is based on user involvement, but this can be a somewhat fragile concept. Why? Because the whole community won’t submit content, most of them will actually be rather passive.
Statistics from Wikipedia makes this evident. Wikipedia is one of the most famous web 2.0 sites and it is written collaboratively by volunteers, allowing articles to be changed by anyone with access to the website. 50 % of all Wikipedia article edits are done by 0.7% of users, and more than 70% of all articles have been written by just 1.8 % of all users. Another example is YouTube.com (online video site) that each day has 100 million downloads and 65 000 uploads. That puts the “creator to consumer” ratio at just 0.5% (Guardian)
Dot.net magazine analysed the phenomenon in their latest issue and they concluded: “It would appear that web 2.0 is being powered by a relatively small number of people: these are the net mavens”.
So what is a maven? A maven is an expert in a particular field, usually one that is self appointed and who seeks to pass his knowledge on to others (Wikipedia). The beauty with mavens is that they contribute to these sites for other reasons than financial. It seems that they will use your website to satisfy their personal needs and this will be essential to the success of your web 2.0 site. What strikes me as important is to find these mavens and ensure that they have the best possible platform to express their needs, as well as satisfying the non contributing audience’s needs.
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Vintage blogging
There can’t be many more traditional industries than wine making and certainly not many with a greater aversion to ‘the internet’, so it is refreshing to see a small South African winery called Stormhoek breaking the trend so effectively with its highly successful blog.
If you are thinking about setting up a blog, they’ve produced a wonderful guide to wine blogging to go with it. Its nineteen pointers are sound advice for any company considering blogging. My own favourite is ‘Talk in your own voice’:
Don’t try and fabricate what you say into marketing and PR speak. If you’re not talking in your normal human voice, the blogosphere will know. The internet is about people, not technology. Sounding like a machine turns people off
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Seminar at The Ritz
If you missed this breakfast seminar - you missed a good breakfast! It featured Mark Sherwin and Adrian Porter who touched on many interesting topics. Mark presented the ‘Seven Habits of Highly Effective Websites’ and Adrian presented practical tips and examples on ways to enhance your website’s ability to communicate its message. 
Attendance was good and the crowd was enthusiastic. The oak smoked salmon wasn’t that bad either. -
Rats in the Toilet - A Lesson in Crisis Management
On a fine bank holiday Saturday morning, a few months ago, my early morning visit to the bathroom was duly disturbed by my discovering that a rat had set up home in my U-bend. Living on the second floor, this wasn’t something that I had really considered as a possibility, but flushing the toilet brought this into reality as a rat jettisoned itself out of the toilet bowl and into my bathroom. Naturally I fled the scene quicker than …well a rat jumps out of the toilet.
I suddenly realised however that I had a potential crisis on my hands. Having rushed out and waited for the hardware store to open, bought a rat trap, primed it and pushed it into the bathroom through a narrow gap in the door, I sat back and waited. The hours flew by and the sound of a trap snapping shut was not to be heard – my crisis was escalating so other options had to be investigated. My local council do offer a rat collection service as indicated on their website, but being a bank holiday, I wouldn’t even be able to contact them until Tuesday and it was still only Saturday. Sunday came and the rat was still there – it was time for action. I’ll spare the details but there was eventually blood on the floor and a dead rat to be disposed of. Crisis over.
Lessons learnt
This whole incident brought home to me that however well prepared you think you are and however unlikely it is that an event may happen, there is always that small possibility that a crisis may occur, and that the best if not ‘only’ approach is to tackle the problem yourself. This may naturally mean calling on the assistance of others if specialist skills are required, but if it is your problem, it is you who has to take ownership and make sure that it gets resolved – no one else will.Transposing this experience to the workplace, I guess it is best to consider what could happen to your website? The obvious ones being that the site is hacked and defaced or under most extreme circumstances, subjected to a Distributed Denial Of Service (DDOS) attack. I remember talking with some friends at an ISP once about a DDOS attack that one of their hosting clients had been subject to. The company in question had actually received an email threatening the attack with associated ‘ransom’ demands a few days earlier, but this had been ignored. The attack subsequently happened and brought not only their server to a grinding halt but also a whole bunch of servers hosted by innocent bystanders – most of which could have been averted if the ISP had been forewarned of the impending attack.
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Fit for Purpose? An experience in poor user testing
I love online banking and its adoption by
banks has given me and almost everybody else the facility to manage
their accounts more effectively, and if you are anything like me, that was
something I had totally neglected in the past.I wonder sometime however as to how many
humans actually test these systems, as reflected in my recent experience of using
HSBC’s messaging system (no more phoning call centres for me!). This system
allows you to send a secure ‘email’ to their customer support service which I
used to try and send a simple message along the lines of the following:Hi,
A few
days ago I transferred £82 from my current account to my VISA account to pay my
credit card bill, but it still hasn’t appeared – is there a problem?Regards
On pressing ‘Send’ however, I got an error
message along the lines of:It was not possible to send your
message because of an illegal character: ‘?’Rather strange, I thought not to allow
question marks in a messaging system primarily designed to send questions, but
I went back – edited the message to remove the question mark, pressed ‘Send’,
but again got the same error message. Obviously there was something in the
message which the system did not like, but there were no more question marks in
the message. By process of elimination, I worked out that it was actually the £
sign which was incompatible with their message processing system and by
substituting this with GBP, I was able to send the message.I do a lot of testing work at Precedent on
projects that we develop and also assist on some of the technical testing for
the Porter Research Reports, so come across all sorts of problems on a day to
day basis, but you would think that a large organisation such as HSBC, who I’m
sure do extensive testing on any module before it is deployed would actually
have considered that this particular system might just be used to discuss
financial transactions which in the UK invariable are done in £s and that even as part of the specification of the system, they would have defined which characters would be deemed illegal - but there again, perhaps not?
