Teamwork Rules – Optimizing for iPhone

During Thursday’s class Dr. Piercy had us optimize a link directory page  for iPhone usability.  Though he led us to water by pointing us to Jonathan Stark’s “Building iPhone Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript,” that doesn’t mean I can drink.  It is a tremendous source of information, and does an excellent job boiling down to what’s important in a step-by-step sorta way. Of course, coding is not easy.  Fortunately, as I am so often reminded of in my tenure as an MBA student- teamwork rules!  My awesome partners Rita and Roya were on hand to help. Together we figured out the minutiae of how to optimize and directory for iPhones- I’m pleased to announce my humble site is available at http://ebiz.terry.uga.edu/~entrprnr/iphone.html. Check it out on your iphone and the optimization will blow your mind.  Wohoo!

In other news, I learned last week how to embarrass myself on camera.  We haven’t edited this footage yet to make it Wordia.com-ready, but it’s still funny.. Me defining Twitter.. off the cuff.. http://drop.io/jwxy9ju# <-Drop.io rules. Right click on the video thumbnail and click “preview.”

E-Commerce breakdown

Last week in class we scratched the surface a bit about e-commerce.  As Dr. Piercy demonstrated in class, e-commerce is characterized by six major criteria:

1) ubiquity – it’s everywhere even if we don’t realize- downloading a ringtone, ordering online, getting a hot app..

2) global reach – the internet is everywhere. So is internet commerce. Fun fact: The adult entertainment industry was the first to make money on the internet, pioneering e-commerce.

3) standards – Want that bonsai tree out of  Japan? There better be standards.

4) richness- Old-school online stores just don’t cut it.  They don’t have the offerings, professional feel, or sense of credibility.  E-commerce is a multi-billion dollar market. Information better look good, be good, and work.. well.

5) interactivity- If you can’t interact, you might as well put a stamp on your store that says “Greetings from 1994. We’ve moved to AngelFire.”

6) info density- Related to richness.  Do the product/service offerings reflect the massive quantity of information available? If you’re not leading or abiding by what’s new- you’re old news.

SEO DON’Ts

You know your do’s, but do you know your SEO DON’Ts?

On Thursday David Felfoldi of Atl-based Sherpa Web Studios talked about the do’s and don’ts of SEO/SEM.  Many people are somewhat familiar with the basic do’s (I wrote a research paper on it, available here), but what of the don’ts?  I realized I hadn’t given it much thought.  Dave pointed out a few great “don’ts” that will enhance your overall optimization attempts:

Don’t..

..Choose a hosting service that drops your page- if it’s not up a bot can’t find it and you’ve missed your chance to get indexed.  This happens at lower cost sites, so the cost benefit analysis is up to you.

..Use low-quality external links.  A link from your site to somewhere with a page rank of  or 1 does you no good, telling bots you’re network is less relevant.

..overuse your keywords.  Don’t make it any easier for the competition to tap into your strategy.

..Let your keywords get inconsistent.  If you use a plural because it gets hits, use that everywhere.  Typically using the singular form is advantageous but like with anything it depends.

..Forget to use a pay-per-click test campaign first to see what works and what doesn’t.  In many instances it’s not how many hits you get but the quality of those hits.  Are the right people finding you?

Thanks, Mr. Felfoldi for taking the time to give your excellent presentation.

 

-SR

Is your site found, or Findable? The Big Difference.

According to ancient lore and Wikipedia, “findability” is “the ability of users to identify an appropriate website and navigate the pages of the site to discover and retrieve relevant information resources…  The focus on findability is on facilitating and enhancing the user’s overall experience with an information resource.”

Peter Morville, author of Ambient Findability, literally wrote the book on a lot of this stuff, and is the source of the Wikipedia definition above.

Findability is clearly more than Google page-ranking; it’s all elements of a page working in concert to support an enhanced user experience.  The main involved areas are as noted SEO (if you can’t get to the site, it’s certainly not “findable”), usability, information architecture, and accessibility.

Usability refers to how easily a user can navigate a site to reach a goal, whether that’s a product, service, or information.  Once you’re at a site, is what you’re looking for “findable,” or is the experience cluttered with extraneous information or steps?

Information architecture, as the sage Wikipedia points out, has multiple definitions that share common qualities: a structural design of shared environments, methods of organizing and labeling websites, intranets, and online communities, and ways of bringing the principles of design and architecture to the digital landscape.  The information of a site needs to be developed and conveyed in a logical way that supports the user’s quest to find whatever he or she is looking for.

Accessibility, as Joe Dolson of  Accessible Web Design points out, “On the whole.. should always trump marketing.. there’s no search marketing benefit to choosing a less-accessible solution.”  ”Though accessibility is most commonly referred to as the right of the disabled to access  a site, it also more generally refers to the degree to which something, like a site, is accessible to as many people as possible. Does a site, inadvertently or not, erect barriers to navigation?  For example a site with all text doesn’t help less proficient readers. Then again, a site with no text won’t be accessible to the blind, whose accessibility tools will have nothing to read.

Clearly, there’s more to findability than one might expect.  However, remembering that an effectively ‘findable” site involves multiple aspects of a web experience can help ensure your site remains top notch.

-SR

Ipone apps are cool, we got it. But what are the best practices for developing web sites for viewing on an iphone?  Find below links to sites that assist development in key areas:

• General iPhone Web page best practices

6 Steps to Building a Better iPhone app – Mashable.com

• Working with the viewport

Define a Viewport – iPhoneCompatible.net

• CSS for good iPhone Web pages

Perfect Multi-column CSS liquid layouts – MatthewJamesTaylor.com

Web Design Inspiration for the iPhone – cssiphone.com

• The WebKit and using it’s features for iPhone Web apps

To WebKit or not to WebKit within your iPhone app – DrNicWilliams.com

Make the most of the iPhone SDK – Lipidity.com

• the iUI (User Interface Framekwork for Safari Development on iPhone)

Introducing iUI – JoeHewitt.com

Google Code iUI wiki – code.google.com

The Semantic Web with @GeorgiaWebGurl

Robin Fay is a big deal in the web world.  She’s a self described “multimedia artist, web junkie, metadata / knowledge worker, consultant, photographer, opensource fiend, social media advocate, magazine editor, librarian.”  At UGA she’s in charge of managing the library’s digital information, and in that post gets to try out all sorts of cool new technology.  On Thursday she spoke to our class about the future of the semantic web.  I’ve posted on that area before, but still only barely understand what it all means.

source: http://web2.wsj2.com/ via RobinFay.net

Here’s what I took away from her excellent presentation, without getting too technical:  Web 3.0 has everything to do with the semantic web.  The semantic web learns from our choices and gets smarter, delivering a personalized, enhanced web experience.  If Web 1.0 was a press release Web 3.0 is a personal assistant.  But how does it work?  Not surprisingly, the framework of the semantic web is data. Lots and lots of meta data, or data about data.  If in the web ontology language (OWL), which attempts to define objects and their relationships to each other, everything on the internet could theoretically “talk” to each other, linking relevant items together like so many firing synapses in the human brain.

The challenge is figuring out how this data gets generated.  As Fay points out, libraries, museums and other institutions already have huge volumes of structured information. To say going back through it and adding meta data is an arduous task is a massive understatement.   Though many social networking sites automatically create metadata, other sites might not.  And in that case if people don’t tag their content there’s nothing to connect.

The challenges to a robust semantic web are large, but great minds are pushing forward.  According to Fay, to make Web 3.0 a reality we need smarter computers, better web standards, enhanced behind the scenes structure (RDF), more built-in metadata generation tools on social media stites, and better search engines.

To see for yourself how the semantic web uses metadata to generate smarter results, try one of the below search engines recommended by Fay:

• http://hakia.com/
• http://www.exalead.com/search/
• http://www.yr-bcn.es/demos/microsearch/

To catch up with what Fay is up to, check out RobinFay.net.

Guest Post! Best practices for producing and distributing video on the Web

Thanks for the report, Roya Eidizadeh!  Roya is my teammate in our MIT class.

As far as quality is concerned, we can never achieve TV quality for web videos. This is mainly due to bandwidth limitations and the results of video compression.
In order to improve web video quality, there are certain procedures for the compression practices. As we know, Video can capture only two dimensions of the world. Therefore a certain percentage of quality of images and sounds will be lost as we cant capture all three dimensions. If we use a higher quality camera, we will be able to minimize the loss of quality. Additionally in order to deliver video on the web, compression is a necessity. This will reduce the data information and amount again, therefore having an impact on video quality. This is why proper compression needs to take place in order to keep a good quality in place at the same time.

According to our research we found out that there are two main types of web vidoes: streaming and progressive download.

Streaming is the preferred method for larger files. The streaming is live and is delivered in realtime online. It takes less time to download and end users will not need to download the entire thing in order to view it.

With progressive downloads. we have to make sure of the type of internet connection that the end user will have to view the video. This method is not desirable for users with a smaller bandwidth. At the end of the day, a copy of the file will be copied in the users personal computer. Therefore with larger videos, this will take up a lot of space on the end user’s side.

From Google to Zoho, the future of web technology

Gears (lets you use Google apps like Docs and Calendar offline) is part of Google’s package of  what I’ve recently learned is termed “online productivity application offerings,” a deliciously verbose description of web technology that helps you get stuff done.  Dr. Piercy asked us to research and report on a few of them.  I looked at Google Docs, Microsoft Web Applications, Zoho and ThinkFree.

Both Google with Google Docs and Microsoft with Microsoft Web Applications are in the game.  Google Docs has been out a while now, is free and is integrated to Gmail, giving it a leg up.  As we discussed in class, MS’s offerings better be either free (it isn’t) or be really good to compete.  MS certainly talks the talk, boasting lofty phrases like “server virtualization” and “centralized management.”  These terms sound cool if a bit corporatespeaky.  From a quick poke around I can tell MS provides some pretty sophisticated stuff.  If you want to run a business with a bunch of “virtual” computers that are managed like physical systems, are (allegedly) secure and integrated then MS is probably the way to go.

Zoho Takes the Cake

But because I don’t live in a world where people would pay for something they could otherwise get for free, I’m going to skip going in too deep about MS Web Applications.  Before this post I figured G-docs was where it was at- I could start documents and share with others, even if the formatting tools are pretty much awful.  My colleagues and I still have to move content back to Word to get to the finished product (score one for web-based Word).  ThinkFree is sort of a social site in the sense you can share and learn from others.  While it’s “access from anywhere” capability is no longer unique, its offline access “Power Tool” (a la Gears) lets the user access all online documents while offline.  That’s pretty cool but everyone’s doin’ it.  The real power here is the ease of document sharing.

Zoho though takes the cake.  I am incredibly impressed by the range of its offerings, everything from Ajax-based word processing to an invoicing tool- all free! Not only that, but I’m blown away by its functionalities.  Editing a doc is as good as Word, and from what I can tell even easier.  You can also work offline like all the others.  Wow.  Consider this Next Generation Web Citizen (Zoho’s flattering words, not mine) a convert!

Grind your Gears with Rich Media

During class on Thursday Dr. Piercy asked us to break into groups then research and present on various Rich Media applications.  The group assignments covered the following:

• Adobe AIR
• JavaFX
• Microsoft SilverLight
• OpenLaszlo
• Google Webkit and Gears
• AJAX
• Curl
• Cappuccino

I really enjoyed this exercise.  Technophiles joined forces with wannabees like me to quickly mobilize and deliver informative presentations about things I didn’t know much about (Heretofore I had thought a “cappuccino” was merely an overpriced hot beverage; who knew it was an “open source framework”?).

No one in the group particularly relished the idea of organizing our research and presenting to the class so I jumped in with MBA gusto, happy for the opportunity to finally add something of value.  My group drew “Google Webkit and Gears.”  Webkit it turns out is an open source browser initiative seemingly tied to Apple via Safari.  Not exactly sure yet what that’s all about.  I was happy though to pull Gears.  I signed up some time ago but wasn’t exactly sure why.  I had a vague idea it allowed me to work offline, but that’s about it.  My group researched the topic and shared our findings with each other.

I ended up learning some pretty nifty things.  For example, I learned that the seamless transition between on and offline productivity comes down to three key elements:

• A local server, to cache and serve application resources (HTML, JavaScript, images, etc.) without needing to contact a server
• A database, to store and access data from within the browser
• A worker thread pool, to make web applications more responsive by performing expensive operations in the background

To rephrase that in language I can understand,

• a local server kicks in when you go offline. When you’re back online it updates the web-based server.  That way you can, say, write and save updates to an email or a Google doc even if you drop offline. In the old days you could lose your email- argh!
• The local database provides the same functionality on more sophisticated files, like say a Google form.
• And who doesn’t like speed?  Three cheers for the Gears “worker thread pool.”  That kind of makes me think of factory workers taking a cool dip, but really it’s just a funny way of saying, “more stuff happens in the background so your user experience isn’t negatively affected.”

Interesting stuff to know.

Dr. Horrible sings all the way to the bank

Part of this week’s assignment was to post about the historic event of a web-based program winning an Emmy. Joss Whedon (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Firefly) won the first ever “Short-format Live-Action Entertainment Programs” emmy for Dr. Horrible’s Sing-along Blog starring Neil Patrick Harris.  Ironic that a show not seen on TV won a TV award?  You betcha!

In the three part webisode, wannabe super-villain Dr. Horrible (Neil Patrick Harris) wants to join the “Evil League of Evil” and win the girl, but Capt. Hammer (hilariously played by Nathan Fillion, aka Capt. Malcolm Reynolds of Firefly fame) blocks his every move.

The production is definitely a lot of fun.  I actually laughed out loud watching Capt. Reynolds cry his heart out to a therapist after a setback in episode 1.  Not to mention some of the songs are now pretty firmly stuck in my head.

It’s easy to forget that the show wasn’t actually on television.  That video broadcasting on the web has gotten big is old news.  What is news is how web programming is now influencing TV, not the other way around.  Thanks to the low cost and hyper-distribution capabilities of the web, creative ideas that might never have made it to TV can now blossom online, build an audience and make waves.  Dr. Horrible has done just that.  On the internet, content is king.  A video production group can put something out, listen to its audience, make (or not make) changes and move forward.  That type of on-the-fly production is simply not possible in the current TV production world.

So as web content becomes more sophisticated and “emmy worthy,” what are the implications for TV?  For starters, TV better see the writing on the wall.  Content is getting ever better, doesn’t as easily get dumbed down to the lowest common denominator and can more easily adapt to different target markets.  There are always going to be restrictions in TV, mostly given high production costs.  But what about a hybrid?  After a new TV episode of something  is aired on TV, don’t be surprised if the audience gets treated to a “‘tween” episode before the next TV episode.  Story lines could continue, plots could thicken and laughs could keep rolling with relatively minimal additional investment.  In the future (especially with internet-ready TV’s, expect TV programming to look more like the web, not less.