This week’s Sunday Business section on New York Times has an interesting article about Yahoo!’s approach revamping their homepage - one bit at a time.
Even though this is not the practice that I am familiar with, the idea of letting users to adopt a new interface in a step by step fashion does seem very piratical, and convincing to me. For websites that have millions of users (including my company), any change, whether it’s good or bad, runs a huge risk of alienating existing users, and the impact is sometimes unpredictable.
“If you go from light to dark by flipping a switch, your eyes may hurt for a minute or two, you may end up being able to see faster if you use the dimmer.” - Tapan Bhat, Yahoo!
From the Development Team - Google Chrome PR Video on YouTube
Today’s buzz word is Google Chrome. After trying it out for a few hours, I can say my experience was mostly good. Love the clever UI (finally, combination of the Address and the Search bar), speedy as advertised.
Forget the positive/negative comments on your favorite tech blogs, here is a really nice article from GigaOm on why a Google browser matters:
Muxtape.com (an online service that allows users to upload mp3s and create digital mix tapes) was shut down yesterday citing problems with the RIAA, and I just found out why Pandora.com (a popular personalized internet radio service) has also decided to pull the plug:
Last year, an obscure federal panel ordered a doubling of the per-song performance royalty that Web radio stations pay to performers and record companies.
Traditional radio, by contrast, pays no such fee. Satellite radio pays a fee but at a less onerous rate, at least by some measures.
As for Pandora, its royalty fees this year will amount to 70 percent of its projected revenue of $25 million, Westergren said, a level that could doom it and other Web radio outfits.
Having listened to the lecture podcast Music Artists Go Entrepreneurial (mentioned in my earlier post) , I think I got a good picture of what’s happening between the music industry and the online content distributors, and how the artists, the real content owners, are trying to bypass them both using various social media tools. It seems ironic to me that the fight is more about the ownership of the Internet than the content itself.
A series of weekly lecture podcast provided by Stanford Technology Ventures Program. Speakers include Larry Page (Google), Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), Sue Decker (Yahoo) and leaders from various industries such as web2.0, biotech, venture capital, academic and entertainment.
The technology blog TechCrunch has a recent post on Startup Presentation Tips quoting the email from Jason Calacani’s mailing list (the founder of Silicon Alley Reporter, Weblogs and Mahalo). It caught my attention as the topic is relevant to my work and it’s also very useful in many real-life situations.
Other than tips such as “Show your product within the first 60 seconds”, or “Talk about what you’ve done, not what you’re going to do”, I find this particular one amusing:
9. How to handle questions you don’t know the answer to
a) take a moment to think about the question. You can even say “Hmmm… that’s a good question. Let me think about that for a second.” Folks appreciate a little consideration when someone takes a question.
b) if you don’t have an answer be honest and say you don’t. There are many ways to say this including: “I’m not really sure, I’m going to have to think about that for a bit and get back to you,” or “I’m not sure to be honest. What do you think?”
c) feel free to think out loud and brainstorm with the person. You can do this by saying “I’ve never really considered that. Perhaps you can expand the question a little and we can explore it right now.”
d) if you’re not sure of the answer you can always say you’ll cross that bridge when you come to it. “I’m not sure how we would deal with a sudden spike in the cost of bandwidth, we would have to collect more information and answer that question down the road. It is a manageable risk factor I suppose. ”
The worst thing to do when you don’t have an answer is b.s. the person. No one has an answer for everything, except a b.s. artists. So, feel free to say you don’t know–folks find it refreshingly humbleand honest.
I read an interesting article on Read Write Web yesterday about the gradual transformation of the blogging landscape through concepts such as micro-blogging, lifestreaming or widgetization.
I don’t think what’s been described in the article necessarily represents the “future” per se (well, at least not yet), but this one-small-piece-at-a-time, or the bite-sized approach for content generation seems to be a common character and a trend that is hard to ignore.
Yongfook.com (above), one of the websites mentioned, is an new type of blogging format that combines custom widgets and the Twitter-ish, chronologically-ordered content structure. I find this communication style has scary similarities to the Facebook Walls.
Great statistics for those who are interested in the usage trends of Social Networking websites.
The only social networks studied that didn’t have more women than men in the 18-24 year old group were venerable old LinkedIn (where incidentally the 25-34 age group was tops) and a site called Perfspot.
Other highlights:
Women ages 14-24 dominate activity on social networks and have more friends than men of the same ages.
Men ages 35+ are more active and have more friends than women of the same ages.
The average social network user has 2-25 friends.
There are a disproportionately high number of 69 year olds across various social networks. (my guess is that it’s the most popular ‘fake age’)
This post has made my day … with a bit of bitterness.
At its charming new stock price of $12, the New York Times Company (NYT) has an enterprise value of about $2.85 billion. As BusinessWeek’s Jay Yarow notes, after you back out all the non-core stuff, that means that the New York Times itself–the paper and the digital assets–are valued at about $750 million. That’s less than half of what CBS just paid for CNET…
I attended a WebGuild event few months ago on the topic of Social Search and saw some interesting demos from sites like Mahalo (human power search engine) and Eurekster (search meets wiki). My instant reaction was mixed: how would the result-refining task ever work on a large scale? how to measure the quality of a search query? Is collaborative filtering a good or bad thing for the users?
I am not an SEO expert, so purely speaking from a user’s perspective, I would choose variety over accuracy since I believe “diversified definitions” is exactly what makes the Web so attractive compared to other media. That being said, I am pretty happy with the way search works today, and I think tagging as opposed to ranking, is where improvement is needed.
I goggled “better search algorithm”and this article ranks second on the first page. Here is a direct quote:
What if we had an “open source” search engine that everyone working in and around the area of search could plug into? The companies working in tagging, shared searching, audio and video search could offer their results/indexes to the open source search engine so that their meta data could be considered in preparing the best results?
With the above being said, this post was a result of what came into my mind after seeing the video demonstrating Google’s Digg-like search interface on TechCrunch this morning.
8.22 Audio Player
8.16 WP SEO Pack
8.16 XML Sitemap
8.02 Addthis
8.01 Feed Burner
8.01 Sitemeter
7.10 Google Analytics
7.05 Juno Player
7.02 Font Size Control
7.01 Nexgen Gallery
6.30 My Anobii Bookshelf
