| 4 January 2005:Happy new year |
In this issue
Featured article Last year – this year.Now is the time for us to review last year and see what is in store for next year. SearchYahoo switched on its own new search engine, but somehow nothing seems to have changed. To me it was a bit of a damp squib. The Google percentage of searches has gone down of course because Yahoo used to use Google for its searching, but somehow – sigh…. No great revolution in search. The Yahoo billboard campaign is so low-key I am not sure what it is for. A search box (that looks nothing like the web site) has a keyword on it and an arrow pointing (sometimes) to something related. So we have a car wash in Chiswick with a Yahoo poster pointing to it saying ‘clean car’. I guess it sounded like a great idea when the ad agency presented it. Very creative I am sure. Call me old fashioned, but a secret ingredient would do more for me. Microsoft will do its 800 pound gorilla act in the search arena in 2005. Google had an easy ride with Yahoo, but 2005 will not be anything like as easy. The new Microsoft search engine is very promising in its beta version and they have a fantastic advantage in owning most desktops. VOIPVOIP (Voice over IP – or the Internet Phone) grows quickly in the States, slowly in the UK. I am still using my VOIP phone from PipeMedia (now owned by someone else – BusinesServe) but although it always seems fine to me I get complaints from callers sometimes that I am ‘breaking up’. So no prizes for quality – but it is cheap. I got a call last week from VOIP communications inc – well at least from their call centre in Egypt. They use the spurious argument that as the telephone companies are using VOIP and gaining cost advantages why not cut out the middle man and go straight to the source. Spurious because there is a world of difference between the Internet and a fully managed internal network like the one BT uses. Anyway as VOIP communications’ prices were similar to One-Tel I didn’t see the point. The big US company Vonage which promised to start up in the UK this year didn’t. Maybe things will hot up in 2005. VOIP gives the phone company the advantage of not needing to pay for the loop from the customer’s phone to their exchange. This has to be worth something. So they should be able to offer VOIP service cheaper than by land line. But quality has to be acceptable before we will make a wholesale switch. Web technologyThe glacial move towards style sheets for page layout (I will do an article on this soon) continues. We are switching now and people with Netscape 4 will just have to lump it I guess. The advantages are just too great to ignore. We are also moving towards taking more account of accessibility issues (an article on that soon as well). News sites are adopting RSS (a digital feed of news stories which are consolidated by an RSS reader. Article soon etc…) but the problem we have with this technology is that we can’t place ads on the feed in the same way we can with a daily newsletter. Other folliesT-Mobile has moved into pole position for paid wireless access. However I wonder if this is going to be the big business they expect. I think WiFi will become available as a free service in many places as it is so cheap to set up. T-Mobile may find it has an infrastructure that no-one want to pay for. E-conveyancing moved one step closer to disaster as tenders were requested in July. Its too early to predict what form the final nemesis will take. Will it crash and burn or just be quietly buried. Watch this space. Business intelligenceAre you fond of these clever tricks to get your message in front of the punters?
These are among the most hated techniques in a recent piece of research. Not only do users dislike these techniques they transfer this dislike to the advertisers. Catalogue retailers are increasingly getting a significant percentage of their sales on-line now. A recent article gives two sources that indicate that Lands’ End in the US gets either 30% online or 50% online. Hmmm… well a lot anyway. If any of your clients are catalogue companies that are not doing well on the web maybe their web site needs looking at. Technical tip: horizontal / vertical.First a disclaimer. I am the world’s worst page designer. I have no sense of colour, shape or anything really. However from a usability point of view I have two beefs with many designers. Too much vertical space for graphical elements.Many designs come to us that look great, but once we try and add the content we immediately get into problems because there is just not enough vertical space. The top of the page is so filled with swishes, images, white space and so on, that the poor punter can’t find the content. The important rule is that the visitor needs to see a substantial amount of the page content on an 800x600 screen without scrolling (the ‘above the fold’ part of the page). Of course, you also need enough white space so that design doesn’t looked crammed and cluttered. Over and over again I find that each vertical pixel is precious. Not using the horizontal space.You don’t need to fix the page width. We can make web pages that are ‘liquid’ and stretch to fill the horizontal space. However there is an important proviso here – lines of text that are too wide are very difficult to read. So we can’t just stretch out the text column, we need to be cleverer than that. These are issues that designers need to take account of and work with. It can be difficult – but that is why they pay you so much money. News from the webA new search engine was launched this month by Bill Clinton (they must be well funded!). The first thing that makes you think they are a keyword short of a full search is the name - Accoona . How do you spell that? The USP is that you can indicate which of your keywords is most important to you to refine your search. I tried it and basically it is broken. I searched on ‘Textor Webmasters’ and up came our home page. I selected the Supertargeted option and there were no results. Watch out for law suits as a company called JGR Acquisition starts to use the obscure patents for e-commerce which they just purchased for $15.5 million. The company owning them (Commerce One) went bust and apparently JGR (whoever they are) have purchased all their patents. Commerce One planned to make the technologies available royalty free in important areas such as XML. Now – watch this space. The top ten viruses have been announced and the number one spot goes to the Netsky-P worm. A German teenager has been arrested as the author of the Sasser worm and possibly Netsky-P. I hope they throw away the key. People play games, go shopping and meet dates on the Internet. So why not use the Web to download the perfect mood-enhancing fragrance? Come on! But it's true – only the Japanese…. If you are as buried in spam as I am, you will have noticed the increase in Spiritual Spam. Because these are not commercial messages they are not covered by the American CAN-SPAM legislation. In one example we are urged to "Deliver me from all my sinful habits.”. The first sinful habit they can get delivered from is sending spam. Two new domain endings coming soon .mobi and .jobs. .mobi is intended for versions of sites that are targeted at mobile devices (Hmmm can’t we do this with style sheets without needing a whole new site?) .jobs will be handy. A law suite in the States may stop you buying a competitor's trade name as an AdWord keyword on Google. Google is going to scan the content of seven major libraries (including our own Bodleian). Now you can search on Yahoo for video. What do you do with that unwanted Christmas gift from your employer? Don’t sell it on ebay – at least if your employer is the Queen and the gift is a Christmas Pudding. You could get sacked.
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