Entries from June 2007
For a while now any business owner I’d spoken with about blogging, social networking, and the general idea of a community of fans online I also told about buzz. That is, people are talking about your product or service online and best of all, you not only can know exactly what they’re saying (unlike verbal word of mouth) but you can talk to them about it!
When asked how to find out about this buzz, I usually prescribed a number of various tools, search engines, etc that they could use to track their companies buzz.
Thanks to Mike, I’ve found a better way. I don’t know if he realized it, but he created the acronym SOS- Search Once and Subscribe. Well, I’m going to take Mike’s post and tweak the ‘O’, if he doesn’t mind.
This tweak is Search, Observe, Subscribe. Business SOS.
Mike has already outlined the benefits and process, so I just thought I’d try to solidify the idea
- Search: Find the buzz about your company
- Observe: Now that you’re aware of the buzz, read it, remember it, log it, make it matter.
- Subscribe: Subscribing to these searches so you’ll be notified if any new buzz comes up about your company, then observe the new buzz.
Then repeat. I’d say every few weeks, tweak your searches, see if there is anything new buzz about your company to observe, then subscribe to that new line.
Awesome bit of info, Mike!
Categories: Business · Marketing · buzz tracking
Go clubbing much? Are you a blogger? Do you frequently find yourself caught between whether to spend your night grinding, mingling or writing and commenting?
Why blogging is cooler than clubbing.
- I am at a lower risk of my insurance going up when the night is over.
- I don’t have to buy you a drink to get you to talk to me, I just have to leave a comment.
- I never have to worry about not knowing what happened the next day because it’s all publicly documented.
- I can still hear at the end of the night.
- I don’t have to see hits on my blog the next day where as I may end up seeing those who had hit on me the next day.
Have any to add?
Categories: blogging
No way. people needed to do a study to figure out that Myspace users used other social networks, too? Not to be too harsh, but seriously. Couldn’t that time have been put to better use than studying something that is more or less obvious? Like, I don’t know… okay. Nothing witty comes to mind. But it’s 3am.
Categories: amazing studies
I just saw Signal vs. Noise talking about using big sharpies when sketching up UI designs because they believe it helps to ignore details early on. Now, I personally hate paper because I hate erasing. It just bugs me. Using a big sharpie isn’t a bad thought to solving that. But I also like being able to erase parts of what I’ve done… and a sharpy doesn’t allow that. Plus sharpies smell bad. Who likes using stuff that smells bad? That’s like using deodorant that purposely doesn’t do its job (er, sort of).
Anyways, I use a bit of a different method for sketching my designs. I basically create a small, portable white board for about $5. We’ll call it your Portable Design Whiteboard. For those curious to try it out, I’ll explain how to create your own.
How to create your own Portable Design Whiteboard
It’s very simple. You only need 3 things.
1. A place to get your paper laminated
I went to FedexKinkos.
2. Paper to get laminated
You can also get this at FedexKinkos. They also do custom paper sizes. I picked the standard long one (2nd to largest) that is also a little wider for some extra space. I also like stiffer paper as it makes it easier to sketch in my lap.
3. A dry erase marker (most important part)
Not all dry erase markers work well on laminated paper. For example, the cheap Expo dry erase markers from WalMart don’t work. I use Bic Greate Erase Grip XL (Low Odor Dry Erase Marker) and it works great. Comes off fine with a paper towel or hand.
In case you haven’t realized it, to create your own personal design board simply get the piece of paper of your choice laminated. Bingo! You’re done.
Categories: Design · portable design whiteboard
I recently downloaded Firefox 2.0. Call me old fashion, but I don’t like it. I personally hate the new tab system. That’s beside the point I am here to make, though. What I want to say is that Firefox 2.0 is teaching me how to spell.
That’s right. With their Microsoft Word style red underline that comes up on words spelled incorrectly, I am actually improving my ability to spell instead of using Word as a crutch.
Since I’ve started using Firefox 2.0, I’ve learned how to spell exhausted, pursuing, and across.
Take that people who say the internet is dumbing down our writing ability. Thanks to blogging, I can whip out essays in a matter of minutes. Thanks to Firefox, I can spell.
Categories: Rants
I have used Bloglines for over a year now, but alas, I have finally laid my use of their service to rest. While contacting customer service and support did yield a response, suggestions I noticed were often not taken very kindly. Surprising the amount of places that ask for suggestions but don’t really want them. It doesn’t matter where the market is going anyways, right?
With that, Bloglines is a great service if you’re not a heavy RSS reader. I found it nice for managing a small number of feeds, but overall Google Reader is just plain better.
Why is Google Reader better than Bloglines?
For a number of reasons. For one, once you’ve read a blog post on GR (Google Reader) it doesn’t just go away. It becomes marked as read. This means I can come back to look through a number of recent posts at a later time. BL (Bloglines) does not have this functionality. Once I read a post on BL, that post is read and gone from my list entirely. If i want to find it again, I have to go to that blog and find the post. This especially annoying if I’m not exactly sure which blogger it was. With GR, it’s not as much a pain as I can easily scan all the recent posts.
Secondly, BL had no ‘favorite post’ functionality. This made it frustrating when you came across a post you wanted to reference later on or particularly enjoyed. The only option you had was to add it to a social bookmarking site, and not in any convenient manner might I add. GR on the other hand has that nice handy little star you can click to favorite a post. Still, automatically adding an “Add to Ma.gnolia” or del.icio.us wouldn’t hurt. Reduce friction and we’ll love you more, I promise.
Thirdly, although not quite thirdly so much as realizing the first two were apparently enough to get me to switch, BL doesn’t handle custom categories (folders) as well as GR does.
One thing I was surprised to see Google Reader lack was the ability for me to search the content of all of the blog posts I’ve read through with Google Reader. It seems to me that with Google being in search and all, this would be a natural feature. Still, I sit wrong and sadly unable to search.
Categories: blogging · blogs
Since I’ve been considering the various designs of social networks recently, I took some time to examine trends across the various networks and thought I’d share what I found. I was going to make it one long post, but as my free time has been sporadic, I figured I’d turn it into series.
The sites I looked at are: Ma.gnolia, Del.icio.us, Flickr, YouTube, Scribd, Slideshare, Upcoming, Digg, and Facebook.
Primary Navigation
One thing that is common to all of these sites is that their primary navigation is located horizontally on the top, most commonly separated by either a line, or differentiated by a color (like Digg, for example).
Secondary Navigation
While some sites have their secondary navigation left aligned vertically like YouTube and Facebook, the trend more commonly shows the secondary navigation horizontally aligned at the top along with the primary navigation. Lastly, there are a few sites that have the secondary navigation vertically aligned to the right.
Primary & Secondary Navigation
If you take a look at Ma.gnolia, Del.icio.us, Scribd, Flickr, and Slideshare. You will notice that both their primary and secondary navigation occurs horizontally at the very top of the page. This is also true of Google, although they are not a social network. These navigations are usually either centralized to the same location while being divided by some kind of color barrier (ala Digg, Slideshare, and Scribd) or grouped together in a more categorized-type fashion like Ma.gnolia, Del.icio.us, and Flickr (YouTube technically does this with their Primary Navigation). This is by far the most common navigational trend among social networking sites.
Categories: Design · Web 2.0 · social networks
I recently found an interview about Kongregate, the “YouTube for casual games”, through Greer’s blog.
Now, I definitely think Greer has the right vision for Kongregate. It already has a lot of really ’sticky’ things. In his interview with GigaOM, however, I think he just barely misses the mark on helping spread Kongregate.
Kongregate currently doesn’t have the ability to share (embed) games (like YouTube does with video). Greer believes this is
“less of a blockbuster strategy than it was for video.”
He reasons that, among other things, gamers will play a game for hours where YouTube’s videos are generally only a few minutes. I agree entirely, he doesn’t need embedded games, he needs something more.
That more is a more ’sticky’ kind of widget.
The Widget
The way the developers have wisely setup Kongregate makes it the main sticky factor for the games. To have the games embedded outside of Kongregate would cause it to lose its sticky power. This is why a widget that is specific to the users would be much more powerful. This widget would list the users 5 most played games along with their best score and rank if possible. Next to this there would be a nice “Challenge” or “Beat my score!” type of button. Something that calls for the viewer of the widget to try to beat this player. This link, of course, would bring them to the Kongregate site and immediately start their experience. With this kind of widget on various blogs, myspace pages, forum signatures etc. it would hold the sticky power and be much more dynamic in what it’s presenting (a number of possibly enticing & changing games through a trusted source in a quick loading manner versus a single game that takes up space and slows load times).
Oh, one last thing. I could see the expansion of Kongregate into the Facebook platform as a pretty good step.
Categories: Web 2.0 · kongregate
I’ve been doing a bit of personal research on the common design trends among social networks lately. As I’ve been doing this, a question came to mind that applies both to design trends both online and in the real, tangible world.
If you’re trying to appeal to a particular crowd and the trend is ugly, do you keep with the trend?
My instincts tell me no. Initially I wondered if by not continuing with the ugly (as subjective as it may be) design trend you actually create an initial slower connection to the viewer. What I mean is, if people are used to the print media in a certain industry being ugly, would they connect your beautiful print to that industry as quickly as if it were ugly print? On the other hand, if it was a beautiful print, would they simply write you off as corporate?
Even with the above speculation, I hold to my instincts. The point of print media is to have it read (or seen). By having media that is not a part of the ugly trend I would suspect that you’d almost get more head turns. At which point, they are reading and paying more attention to your media than the others. If anything, I’d imagine it would add an additional curiosity, differentiating you from your competitors. A good example of this is Facebook’s design when compared to MySpace.
Categories: Design
