Archive for the 'Strategic Thinking' Category
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Miss Spell, Miss Quote, Make up: a new approach to writing for the web?
I’m a self-professed spelling fanatic. As an English graduate, the mantra of ‘check, check and double check’ is something that’s deeply ingrained in my daily life. So when it comes to writing for the web, a simple case of poor spelling has the potential to drive me to distraction. But while I was browsing the usual suspects online this morning, I found an article which was taking the chance to say something different on the subject: when writing online, why not try deliberately inserting typos, creating new (and potentially ridiculous) words and misquoting well-known sayings?
Now surprisingly enough, while this maybe a bit controversial for the ‘purists’ among us, it is not entirely alien. There are always the established principles that should underpin a good piece of well-crafted copy, but it is also true that introducing humour or trying to do something different with your content can take it to the next level. And that’s exactly what this does – by subverting the user’s expectations, the writer starts to draw them in, intrigue and amuse them and hopefully, provoke a response.
So perhaps what we should be saying is: if you’re going to use wordplay, don’t just be careful – be clever about it. As we always say, the key to success online is in understanding your audiences. An intelligent tweak of wordsmithing can add spice to your content, but if you pitch it wrong then you could both alienate your audience and devalue your online offering.
Have a look at the article and see what you think: ‘Made You Thunk: Engage Your Readers With Typos and Misquotes’ – and in the words of author Nick Cernis, ‘Use your new power responsibly!’
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The customer isn’t right
Taking care of customers, even when they are leaving you, really matters. It’s so tempting to cast them off, forgetting to give them a reason to come back to you one day. However much you think they are making a mistake and particularly in an age when choice matters more than ever.
I’ve been thinking about this ever since my phone call to An Unnamed Mobile Provider to break the news that I was off, iPhone in hand. Being polite, I went out of my way to reassure them that I hadn’t had any particular problems with their service. Best of luck and all that.
Confession: I am one of those people who bought an iPhone on day one. I’ve been waiting for the thing for years, and I’ve not been disappointed. It is a thing of beauty. Highly usable, enjoyable beauty.
“Well, I’m not going to get you to try and change your mind…”
Good stuff.
“But…”
Hmm, don’t like the sound of this
“You’ve got to wonder about people paying for a handset.”
Oh dear.
“I mean, it’s not as if it does anything more than the what we already do”
Sigh. You know, he might be right. O2 might be a nightmare. I might hate my new phone. I might yearn for the days of my old provider and my old phone.
But trying to tell customers who have already made a decision that it’s the wrong one isn’t smart business. The company formerly known as my mobile phone provider won’t be getting business from me again.
And you won’t believe the number of people I’ve told about either…
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A powerful tool for Welsh business
Neil Davis, Director of Strategy at Precedent, has been talking with the Western Mail about Precedent’s arrival in Cardiff and our take on the potential impact of digital media on the Welsh economy.
“the businesses that succeed are typically those that assign a business manager to look after their websites and invest properly in a fully integrated ebusiness strategy”
Read the article in full: Make your website make money, Western Mail
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RSS for dummies
Although RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is really simple and useful, websites are struggling to explain what it is, and more importantly, how people can benefit from it.
Getting started with RSS is a step by step process filled with obstacles and from a user perspective - not very user friendly. First of all, the average user has never heard of RSS and a “What is RSS?” blurb packed with techie terms such as atom, aggregator, RSS, XML, feed and feed reader can easily scare people off.On top of that, most RSS explanations only describe what RSS is, but forgets to explain the real benefits with RSS from a user perspective. What will it do for the user? Why is it better than email? What is the difference from the traditional way of using the internet? If you can answer these questions with as few techie terms as possible, then you might be able to get these people to subscribe to your feed.
Our friends at Common Craft have produced this excellent video which explains RSS in plain English. Thank you!
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Veni, Vidi, Visa
We came, we saw, we went shopping.
Google provides access to a great repository of knowledge capable of settling any pub-born argument. The likes of MySpace bring people together in new and interesting virtual communities. But what of the important things in life, like buying gadgets or shoes?
Though there are many aspects of eBay which make me wonder if they do actually employ any professional web developers, you have to admit they have created the ultimate shopping mall - an almost infinite number and variety of retailers and without all the usually associated walking about.
I buy a lot of stuff off the Net (in particular eBay), several things a month - much to the interest and amusement of my colleagues. In my opinion there are three main benefits to “virtual” shopping compared with “real” shopping.
- It’s cheaper.
- There’s more choice.
- It’s easier.
Let’s start with cheaper. Last year I bought a new flat screen TV. In Currys it was £1,200, in Comet it was £1,100, on Comets website it was £1,000. After a quick search of the Internet, we found someone selling it for £650. That one purchase saved enough money to pay for our Internet access for the year - and some people wonder if they can afford to have the Internet? I say can you afford not to have it!
Choice. Especially when it comes to Christmas and birthdays, you can spend a long time traipsing round the shops looking for something “they” might like. However, most people have a special interest. With eBay, any special interest becomes a potential present. They like the Denver Broncos? Oh look, here’s a Denver Broncos cigarette case. They like lizards? Oh look there’s a belt buckle in the shape of a lizard. To actually find these items in “real” shops, you’d probably have to burn a lot of shoe leather. (I have bought both of those items in the past by the way)
Ease. Well obviously there’s a lot less walking as previously mentioned. However, there’s also the difference between lugging these things home or having them delivered to your door for you. Now when it comes to Christmas, I personally find it much easier to sit in front of a PC, order a few things and have them delivered - rather than getting jostled in the crowds with heavy bags of presents in the middle of winter whilst having “Mistletoe & Wine” played at me.
I’ve just got a new phone (the lovely Nokia N95) and I’ve used eBay to buy loads of cool accessories for it, a 2Gb memory card for under £20 (instead of £40 from the shop), cases, screen protectors, extra batteries and desktop chargers. I’ve even bought a pocket sized Bluetooth keyboard for it! Even if the shop had sold all of those particular items (and most of them they didn’t), they would have charged me at least twice as much. For buying small electronic goods (high value, low postage) you can’t beat the Net.
There are of course a few things to remember. First of all, know what you are buying. There’s a lot of rubbish on the Net (and in shops), so try to find reviews for the item first. Secondly, think about the delivery costs. It might actually be cheaper to walk down the shops and buy it yourself, rather than pay to have it delivered. Don’t just settle for eBay, sometimes you can buy these items cheaper from other websites!
People often worry about the safety aspect of online purchases. Well, I believe it is the safest way to use your credit card. Compare that to handing your card to a waiter in a restaurant, or reading the details out over an unsecure phone line? With most online purchases you have the option of recorded delivery and postal insurance, so you don’t have to worry about things not turning up. eBay/Paypal are very good at handling disputes, but I personally haven’t really had any need to involve them in the past. The only other thing to worry about is the addiction, it’s so easy and there’s so many things to buy that you can get a little carried away and forget that virtual shopping still takes very real money out of your bank account!
That’s it - happy shopping!
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wisdom of crowds
August 24, 2007 1:00 pm An amazing (yet sad) video of the wisdom of crowds (VT massacre) and how quickly wikipedia (people) acted . The video is a time-lapse of the first 12 hours of the Wikipedia article documenting the Virginia Tech Massacre .
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e-learning for the i-generation
The only e-learning tool I used at Uni, was the now rather ol’school Blackboard - also known as a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE). It was supposed to be a useful online resource to post work and to facilitate discussions with our teacher and fellow students. This didn’t really happen. I mean we posted our work, but that was about it. The lively discussions and valuable feedback we gained in the classroom was never recreated.
It turned us off, an we actually started our own blog (it’s in Swedish) as we found it to be a much more flexible and personal tool for posting work and receiving feedback from fellow students, teachers and anyone else who was interested in our work. We actually found ourselves discussing related topics with peers worldwide (check out the map on our blog).
This wasn’t too long ago, and more and more universities are now utilising (and/or asking us for) tools like blogs, podcasts and wikis on their websites (it is being called e-learning 2.0…) and although not designed particularly for use in education, these ‘new’ tools can be used to make e-learning more personal, collective and adaptable.
Teachers are starting to realise the potential of blogs, media sharing services and collaborative tools in enhancing the e-learning experience and they are starting to push for these new technologies just as they are pushing for new pens and other equipment that will aid the learning process. This is not only exemplified in my experience, but also in a recent study where one humanities lecturer is reported to having said:
“I found out all my students were looking at the material in the VLE but going straight to Facebook to use the discussions tool and discuss the material and the lectures. I thought I might as well join them and ask them questions in their preferred space”. Read the full report here.This teacher (as most other teachers) has experienced the first wave of the i-generation i.e. the generation with no recourse to a memory of (or nostalgia for) a pre-internet history). To them, blogs, podcasts, online video and collaborative tools are a part of the ‘natural order of things’ and using anything else (for example the blackboard) will simply put them off.
The universities marketing people are also feeling pressured by the i-generation and they are wondering if these technologies can be used to attract more students. Moreover they are wondering if the i-generation is examining their online offer as much as their offline offer? Is the online community equally important as the offline community? Can simple publishing tools like blogs be used as online word-of-mouth tools? What happens if they criticise us on their blogs? These are some of the challenges today’s universities are facing, and as always there is no out of the box answer.
However, as always, benchmarking is a good start and I’ve highlighted a couple of links to get you started.
Warwick University is probably the most innovative university in the UK. Here’s why: warwickblogs, Warwick icast, Warwick Podcasts , Warwick on MySpace
Brunel University is using podcasts in an innovative way. their podcasts are guiding students through the application process which makes it more pleasant and user friendly. Stanford’s collaboration with iTunes is also an interesting example. Check it out here.
Jean-Claude Bradley is using Blogger to teach chemistry at Drexel University in Philadelphia. check out his blog here.
There are also a lot of new platforms for collaboration popping up, such as open source Elgg (used by University of Brighton ), nuuvo, stu.dicio.us and Digication. These are just a few so please add more e-learning examples or tools by commenting on this post.
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Google web apps….taking over the world?
Google web apps….taking over the world?
Not yet, but given the huge number of ideas the guys at Google are pursuing it might not be long before we expect all our computing to be available online from anywhere.
Everyone knows about Google’s information provision services. The company was founded on Google search and this still generates massive revenues, but Google also provide maps & Google earth, froogle - the price comparison site, groups, news, video - now combined with YouTube, site visitor analysis, the list goes on…. But more recently Google have been developing web based applications such as gmail, Google Talk, calendar, docs & spreadsheets, blogging, image editors and a web page creator to name just a few. These and extended versions will eventually allow you to work from any where, on any computer connected to the internet, with all your data stored online. The end user’s online experience will improve as the web app interface becomes more integrated into future versions of Google’s toolbar plugin.
What else are Google trying at the moment? Google have their labs page (http://labs.google.com/) and Wiki provides a more complete list of their products (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_products).
Obviously this isn’t limited to Google, there are hundreds of other companies and projects aiming for similar goals. All trying to get their foot in the door ahead of the others.
How is this relevant to us. In future people will expect greater control and functionality in the sites they visit. The days of sites presenting data based on standard templates are probably limited. People will expect to be able to change page layouts, select what data is visible and the format it is presented. Social sites, such as MySpace and YouTube, will extend their user interfaces so RSS feeds, external site content and user generated contented can be mashed together even more. Corporate entities will use viral marketing techniques and RSS feeds to get their brand included on other sites.
But will people want to use them? It will probably depend on the situation. At the moment manipulating files online is a slow process as ADSL upload speeds are relatively low. A lot of people don’t like the idea that Google scans all gMail email and uses this to target ads. If you had company work online, would you want a third party potentially reading it? Could you be sure that when you deleted the file it was actually deleted? What would happen if you were denied access to your data stored in another country? Do you want people taking data from your site, changing it and presenting it on another site? How do ensure that external content remains relevant? At the moment the technology isn’t perfected and new web technologies tend to be fad prone.
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Foot Prints
You can’t seem to go anywhere at the moment without a mention or seeing footprints. Footprints in the snow on Wednesday, carbon footprint, ecological Footprint, customer footprint, the list goes on. But it was the foot print in the snow that lead me to think about the amount of time we go down the same paths. So with this in mind when / if you explore a product, be it hardware or software, share the results with your colleagues so that path does not need to be revisited for some time after. This helps in productivity and company knowledge and communications.
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Passwords
I guess I’ve been on the Internet for about 10 years and been a web developer almost as long, in that time I’ve seen the landscape of the Internet change quite considerably. Static HTML “brochure” sites have been replaced by CMS driven e-commerce sites, dodgy chat rooms have been replaced by knowledge forums, profiles and the dreaded blog.
But one thing that has changed very little (not just in that decade, but many before it), is passwords. Passwords are very important, they are by far the most common security model, so why are we so bad at them? Often people just type the first thing that comes into their heads.
Ok, so there’s an awful lot of systems that request a password these days and we can’t remember a different one for each can we? Well that was the opinion of a friend of mine, who ran into trouble when his girlfriend dumped him and then made extensive use of his “Book of Internet Passwords” - ouch.
The alternative (and very common practice) is to stick to two or three main passwords. Here’s a fun thing to try at home kids, set up a really fun site that requires a password, then randomly change it after a week. When your users next login they will try all of their common passwords one after another. Just record that information and together with their e-mail address you can now hack their entire life, starting with their e-mail account where password reminders for other sites will be sent. Just remember to buy something nice for them as a thank you from eBay ok? (on their account of course).
And what passwords do people choose? Well there’s the classics: “god”, “jesus”, “password”, “letmein”, “opensessame”, “trustno1″, “qwerty” - to name just a few. Next, how about some football teams? “Arsenal”, “Chelsea”, “Westham”, “Liverpool”. While we’re at it, let’s have a few pet names like “Buster”, “Tigger” and “Smokey”, then maybe a few of the most popular children’s names like “James”, “Louise”, “Thomas” and “Tracy”. And for our grand finale, a few things that you might find on your desk, “calendar”, “speakers”, “coffeecup” and “mousemat”. Well that should get you into about 90% of computer systems. For the remaining 10%, try running a dictionary against it, remembering to make a second pass where you change all the letters into numbers (harder to type but no more secure). Oh and in particular, make sure your dictionary contains as many geeky references as possible, it should include every planet the NCC1701D has ever visited.
Hopefully you’re reading this and feeling pretty smug, happy in the knowledge that you are in the tiniest of percentages of people with a strong password that is not covered above. But what about everybody else? Chances are if they do have a strong password they can’t remember it and have probably written it down next to their computer in a book of passwords.
“The weakest link in any security system is always the user.”
Maybe biometrics are the solution, but I think it will be a while yet before fingerprint scanners are fitted as standard to every keyboard. What can we do in the meantime? Well my advice would be to use two or more words per password, words that would otherwise not be seen dead with each other and maybe your year of birth for good measure, “cloudyfootball1971″ for example. You should have at least three different passwords based on the level of security. For example, do not use the same password for online banking as some random joke site. Have one for financial stuff, one for email, and one for anything that you really don’t care about.
Ideally, you should change your passwords frequently (especially if you fall out with your partner), but more importantly you should check your computer for viruses which might be logging your every keystroke.
Another area of vulnerability is “Password Hints”. For example, “Name of pet” or “Mothers Maiden Name”. The answers to these questions are often available on the Internet should anyone conduct a quick search or maybe have a look at your profile. People who know you won’t even need to go to that trouble.
Password security systems can be safe, but only if you choose a good password, do you really want to find out what happens if your password isn’t good enough?
