Archive for January, 2006

This, I admit is a pet peeve. You’ll be looking at an ad, magazine, newspaper, or some other printed medium, and at the bottom of the page will be the following:

visit our website
http://www.notarealsite.com

My response to this is… no… I’ve got better things to do and while you feel your company should be intriguing enough to prompt me to enter the URL and check it out… I will not. And neither will anyone else.

So let’s look at some printed ad URL references that WOULD work:

Pet Supply Store:

Check out our KITTEN CAM at
http://www.notarealsite.com

 

What it would take: $40 logitech camera, a USB cable extension, and the internet connection you already have (and a kitten.) Put the cam software in the startup folder and have it run minimized. It won’t bother anyone, and kitten cam (and your web traffic) will live!

Example 2: Collegiate Athletics Store

Check out the Wildcats Rumor Mill
Visit http://www.notarealsite.com

Example 3: Clothing Store

Free Outfit Drawing 2/1/06 ($300 value)
Enter your name at http://www.notarealsite.com

Example 4: Insurance Agency (Yes, even they can improve)

Underinsured or Overinsured?
Free: 2 minute calculator at
http://www.notarealsite.com

…. in short, make me WANT to go to your site. Make it worth my time. BE CREATIVE - think about your business like your customers do.

At the Shmoo Con hacker conference, an engineer at Atlanta company SPI Dynamics called Billy Hoffman says he has a web crawler that acts like you or me. It hits links, javascript, flash, and other page elements like a human does, slowly, with indeterminate pauses. Not only that, Hoffman’s crawler acts like a browser by keeping a cache - downloading only what’s changed as it moves from page to page, killing another tale-tell crawler characteristic. Web crawlers typically ignore javascript, images, and some Flash animations to save power. It’s faster to grab a web page text and index that than to try to grab everything. This makes spiders easy to detect… and to optimize for. Analytics software can treat that traffic differently than human traffic, and our reports can divide it out.

You see, part of the analysis and optimization of web pages in current techniques depends on the spiders not looking at javascript and images. We’ve become used to looking at the site from an efficient, fast crawler’s perspective, and leveraging these elements in SEO work. But a human simulation crawler would throw a wrench into this part of SEO.

It would also make it hard to block bots that were sucking up bandwidth. If you can’t tell what the bot is about, you’ll have to assume it’s human.

I think I’ll write a crawler, too. Mine will be sixpackbot. It will stumble through websites, sometimes three and four times, in circles. It’ll stop for a nap occasionally and then start up again, stopping to hit the john a few times. I’ll ignore robots.txt files, though, cause when sixpackbot is drunk, he goes wherever he damn well pleases.

Happy Friday….

Clickz pointed me to the test being done in NY for hotels in Manhattan. This is expected, and not a huge shock, but what will be important for the future is the use of LOGOS in the details area.

Oddly, in the test, the little details page that pops up did not link the URL shown. So www.holiday-inn.com was not linked in the little box. The title, however, was redirected to http://www.ichotelsgroup.com/h/d/hi/1/en/hd/NYCBY.

A click on the sponsored links in the left side of the box ONLY brought up the map bubble, and did not bring up the site, and there were no alternatives to that other than to then go over to the bubble and click. I would have hoped for a rollover affect to SHOW it on the map and a click-to-site effect on the ad. The question is, will advertisers pay for the map data display or the second click on the header?

Hotstop is a map site with subway and bus directions in New York, Boston and Washington DC, but it brings some innovation to the table that pushes forward the public transportation and local advertising paradigm a few notches.

First, Hotstop gives you transfer information for public transit that you can put on your mobile phone, PDA or printout. So, enter a source and destination and you will have not only a great map, but the transfers you need to make to most effeciently arrive. You set the maximum distance you are willing to walk, the maximum number of buses and trains. Very cool. Google also has a pet project called Google Transit in Portland, and there’s every reason to believe they’re watching Hotstop closely. For tourists, one really nice feature is the “point to location on map”

The advertising initiative is the first time I’ve seen a map site actually put street-level ads on directions pages. So if you say you want to go somewhere on 5th Avenue, it may eventually suggest some places for lunch - perhaps with a coupon.

Innovation: Combine Windows Live Local and local advertising and you get a rather high octane mix of cool and targeted marketing. Take that to the cell phone, and you have context. This is where I see this going. Proximity marketing with visual clues, and ads delivered with content to your phone. I wrote about proximity ads a bit last year. We’ll see what happens!

Then, get some of the gamers involved and we can do live paid placement ad properties in urban games. These spaces are left blank by game developers and the properties are sold as placement ads in accurate virtual worlds. Think of it as digital billboards in a virtual world.

Other idea is to allow a pre-visit to a place you’re heading to. Scope out, via virtual reality, the area so you can get around better, and also explain to someone else where to go.

Idea 1: Imagine if you will a podcast widget.
This little box looks like a tape recorder. It has a play, record, rewind, ff, and pause button, all large and friendly. It has a small (gasp) speaker. When you want to record, you treat it just like an old fashioned tape recorder.

But there’s a twist. It has a USB plug. When you plug it into the computer, it asks you for a title and a date. You enter it, and the recording becomes a podcast on the web automatically and a copy is saved on the computer. Once the podcast upload is done, the device clears itself and is ready for the next recording. The podcast MP3 file is then available on iTunes via a normal Podcast feed…. automatically!

A device like this would make podcasting as easy as tape recording … churches, schools, and workplaces would be able to keep current versions of lectures and presentations on the web with the same work it would take to put it on cassette.

It should be durable and easy to hold..a familiar form that doesn’t intimidate. It should have a built-in stereo mic (like the awesome ones found on good camcorders.) Long periods of silence would be automatically removed, and the volume level of the recording would be automatically maintained. Software inside does this transparently.

It should be cheap and so simple that there are no special skills required. The technology should be good enough to hide all the neuances of recording and publishing. Let’s call it the podcast buddy.

Idea 2: The Podcast phone - or … podcasting from your cell phone.
Imagine a phone number that you call to podcast. A teacher could call this number to record the homework notes for the day, for example. Conference calls could be recorded and automatically podcasted to private audience at a company. Personal podcasts could be done from a cell phone… like blogging from the car.

Ok, we have Google Adwords, which accept payments, and now Google Video, so what’s next? Googlebase, of course! The age of micropayments is finally getting some legs. What next for micropayments? Zoom a little closer on Google maps for a few cents? Scrap the adwords on the page for a few cents a day?