Archive for July, 2006

I have now been using Writely for 6 months and still love it. Google Spreadsheets have become a core tool of my business for communicating tabular data to my clients. These “lightweight” apps are better than I ever expected.

I am updating my Writely - A Web Word Processor document as things progress. It looks like the next step is the changover to Google Login system.

Another winner from Network Solutions. In the Address above, 53rd Street has a space at the end. Good Lord. That’s worse than “the number you are dialing doesn’t require a 1 and area code….” Let the computer do the work, not me!

Are you making bad assumptions about products? traffic? conversion? These questions, asked early and pursued relentlessly, could save many website projects.

Unfortunately, many projects don’t slow down enough to ask these questions - and so the project stalls after much energy and time has been invested. The concept of testing (split testing to be exact) combined with the power of PPC search and well-designed landing pages, can do much to test assumptions - product category at a time - and provide a foundation upon which a larger site can be created.

Not only can you get hundreds of customers’ votes (via their actions) for a few hundred dollars, you can set up split testing to refine your marketing wording, keywords, and product landing pages.

Google Checkout offers a fast way to connect a product to a sales channel for testing actual purchases. With its simple setup and direct funding options, you can set up a product test page in minutes, plugging it onto Google Adwords and conducting product tests all day long.

There simply is no reason to enter a project with assumptions anymore. But most companies do - because they are in such a hurry, or don’t want to pay an experienced person to construct the foundation data, or sadly, they don’t want to believe the data they’ve been given.

If you have interest in a webinar on this subject, contact me.

I’ve got my RSS Bandit set up nicely now. It’s categorized by lots of things such as SEO, PPC, and such. It’s a terrific RSS reader and I highly recommend it. I’ve been using 4-5 other rss tools and this is my effort at consolidating them. It looks to be worth the effort, especially for the “unread” auto-grouping feature. I just have too many feeds that I review regularly. If anyone knows how to make RSS Bandit output feeds to a single feed, I’ll buy you a beer!

I set up a new set of feeds for the surrounding cities - as a part of staying in touch with the real world. Louisville, Lexington, Cincinatti, Nashville, and so on. I’m discovering that Lexington is relatively RSS-dark in comparison to the other towns.

Neither the Convention and Visitors’ Bureau or Commerce Lexington (Chamber of Commerce) deliver RSS feeds. The Lexington Center Corporation (Rupp Arena) doesn’t either. You cannot get LFUCG news via RSS, even though they have a really good news page that is well suited for it. The Lexington Legends site has no RSS feeds either (and is a usability failure if you ask me.) WUKY could sure use some here. Business Lexington still needs to do RSS over their site, too, especially on their breaking news page. The Fayette County Public School seems to have a feed, but it also seems to be broken (XSL style sheet is mucked.)

Ientry.com certainly have metric tons of feeds, but that’s not really local news. NOAA Weather service gives us one for Lexington weather warnings for . KET has a nice set of program feeds here. You can get University of Kentucky news using this feed, and there’s a great New York Times lookup for all things Wildcat. For example, the UK Alumni Association has RSS feeds for news and upcoming events. Pete Koutoulas maintains the Squidoo lens for UK Basketball.

Woodsongs’ schedule is published via RSS. Singletary Center Calendar surely has RSS!… Nope, but it sure is ‘perty. Someone spent a lot of time pixel-tweaking, but not much time usefulizing. Bluegrassreport.org sure has a feed (it’s a blog) and it’s a hot one.

I’m about to build a couple of really terrific sites based heavily on RSS aggregation and look forward to seeing the ins and outs of the medium. My own site already runs pretty heavily on RSS and it works nicely.

Now if you want to do a really good feed search, head over to the tool offered at Ask’s feed search. Within a few minutes I was able to hook up with some really terrific looking feeds such as the nice Lexington Flikr Photo Pool, and for movie buffs, there’s the Bluegrass Film Society.

Ecommerce/Ebay Customers and Shippers like:

• Fast
• Cheap
• Reliable
• Saturday Delivery
• Anywhere-in-the-country

So, USPS and DHL have a program called DHL@Home that banks on both carriers’ strengths to provide shippers a faster, less expensive method for sending packages. But there’s a catch…. you had to ship a lot of packages to get involved - 200-500 a day or more.

But according to Mark Taylor, Chief Logistics Offers at Red Roller and Author of Computerized Shipping Systems: Increasing Profit and Productivity Through Technology (among other books,) Redroller.com now offers this as a shipping option to individual shippers!

DHL@Home offers

• Saturday delivery at no extra charge
• Includes delivery to P.O. boxes
• Superior residential service with final delivery by the USPS
• Option of standard air service (2-4 business days) or ground(2-7 business days)
• Tracking!
• Cheap!

Using DHL’s industry-standard air and logistics network combined with the USPS’ “last mile” infrastructure, the system could reduce costs for light-weight packages common in ecommerce transactions such as those conducted on ebay.

Thanks to Mark Taylor for this Scoop. A full article on this will be posted soon, subscribe to my blog to stay informed.

One of the companies I admire most, Adobe, let me down today. Do you guys ever really “use” the updates you send out? Have you considered that we’re not all sitting in little cubies in Mountain View when we do our updates?

In a standard security update for Acrobat Standard 6.0, you get stuck in an irreversable lock point where they force you to have your disk handy. My disk is 800 miles away. Now I have a non-working Acrobat 6.0. Jeez I’m glad I didn’t do this before my meeting (I used Acrobat at least a dozen times during my trip.)

Why can’t installation scripts look “ahead” to see if a disk is going to be needed before they start stir-frying files?!?!? Better yet, why not just make the download of the files you need an “option” of the install. Yes, yes, it might take a little longer, but I’m on 6mbt broadband here. C’mon, let me have them!

If Time Warner continues down the path of ad-supported services, there could be a major impact to those sending and receiving AOL email. The ads that are inserted within emails will almost surely cause SPAM filters to begin to trigger based on the sponsored content at the bottom of the messages without modifications to some of the bigger filtering tools such as Spamassasin and others. And this will open a can of worms as spammers will quickly figure out how to “imitate” AOL sponsored links.

AOL’s subscriber loss this year reflects that more e-mail subscribers are switching to other e-mail services anyway, but it still represents billions of messages.

If my in-box is any indication, typical AOL senders’ subjects will further kill their delivery once combined with in-message ads. Subjects like “website” or “site” or “need help” are visible on ONE PAGE of my Outlook in-box, all from three different AOL users. With Spam filters these messages will probably never make it through once ad insertion starts. Better start using good subjects now, folks.

Jeez. I don’t normally post stuff like this, but I definitely need to take the rest of the day off and listen to some old Floyd…

LONDON (Reuters) - Syd Barrett, the troubled founding member of Pink Floyd, has died aged 60, after living the life of a recluse for the last 30 years. “The band are naturally very upset and sad to learn of Syd Barrett’s death,” Pink Floyd said in a statement on Tuesday. “Syd was the guiding light of the early band line-up and leaves a legacy which continues to inspire.” http://msnbc.msn.com/id/13814051/

Could someone help me understand the following habit at big box retailers?

1. I buy item x.
2. Item x is defective, I find, after I’ve returned home.
3. I return item x, with my receipt, expecting an exchange (a trade)
4. (item x is still tag-attached, brand new, never used)
5. Merchant requires me to fill in a form.
6. Merchant requires me to have the credit card used to buy the item.
7. Merchant never, ever appologizes for the trouble

Let’s examine the scenario a little deeper.

a) you have a paying customer at your store (marketing paid off)
b) the customer has bought something (a conversion was made)
c) you, or your manufacturer, have put that customer in a difficult position
d) they must now return to the store with the product. Gasoline $2.94/gallon.
e) they must display their receipt.
f) they must FILL OUT A FORM.
g) they must withstand your “we don’t have to do this” treatment.

It’s a TRADE. It’s the SAME PRODUCT. The one I brought back was NEW. I had my receipt. YES, I do deserve to be treated differently than the box-opened, no receipt returns of items with spilled coffee on them.

Am I missing something?

If the customer has a defective product, merchants should be appologizing, offering up $20 off coupons for the trouble or at least saying “Mr. Clark, we are really sorry we inconvenienced you with this.” They should remember that it’s far harder to get a new customer than to keep a current one. And they certainly shouldn’t make you fill in a form unless there is some specific security threat perceived.

And to top it off, you shouldn’t treat a customer as if THEY did something wrong by receiving a defective product from YOUR store. I am not a thief. I am not gaming your system, and I am not going to stand for it.

Another thing, COMPUSA. I only bought this product because I needed it TODAY and couldn’t wait for Amazon to send it to me. So, I pop out of ecommerce serenity to buy a product in a bricks and mortar store, and this is what I get. Do you realize how easy it is to click from site to site? Do you think I’ll shop at compusa.com?

I should have demanded a refund, and walked out empty handed. I miss the choices of larger cities when it comes to computer stores. I wish Fry’s would open something here in Lexington - we need the competition!

I found this video to be one of the best explanations of a confusing topic for small businesses that I’ve yet seen. Sometimes it’s better to show it with metaphors, and this video makes great use of them. Enjoy