PlanWebs Web Design, Online Media & Marketing

by Jim Sterne 

Besides being fun to say and a legitimate excuse to wear my “Mind The Gap” hat purchased the last time I was caught in the rain in Covent Garden, the Feedback Loop Gap is the most pernicious problem faced by those in large companies tasked with running large, sophisticated Web sites.

I don’t for a minute discount the trials and tribulations of those plagued by shrinking budgets, incredulous senior executives, or IT departments facing mergers and acquisitions. I am not turning a blind eye to the pending economic downturn. I am simply responding to what I hear from clients, audiences, blogs and online discussions.

Your Web server generates a great deal of information. It creates logs. Mountains of data are collected in your server logs every day. The assumption is that this information is generated to help you determine how well you’re doing. Nice thought, but not the case.

Log files are merely the result of good, solid engineering. If you create a system that does something, it’s a good idea to record what happened. That way you’ve got a history file to look at when things go bump in the site. Log files are, therefore, the results of a server doing its job, and not a formal effort to capture valuable business intelligence.

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The New York Times
Microsoft is finally embracing the push towards open software (sort of). In a conference call which failed to mention any progress on the Yahoo front, Microsoft executives unveiled a “strategic shift” in the company’s business practices, the broader push of which is to bring Microsoft’s flagship products-the Windows OS and Microsoft Office-further into the realm of Web-based computing.

CEO Steve Ballmer said the move was partly to address Microsoft’s sticky legal situation with the European Union-EU regulators demanded that Microsoft share technical information about its software with outside developers-but was also about adapting to “the opportunities and risks of a more connected, more services-oriented world.”

The first giant step will be putting 30,000 pages of technical documentation about how its Windows and Microsoft server programs communicate-information the company used to regard as a trade secret it licensed out to developers for a hefty fee. Ray Ozzie, Microsoft’s chief software architect, said the move would make it easier for writers to create programs that tap into personal information on a PC.

by Tameka Kee
Search rebounded at the start of 2008, with Americans conducting more than 10 billion “core” searches in January, up nearly 9% from December 2007, according to comScore. In contrast, search volume had slid downward in December, with an almost 4% dip in queries versus the previous month.

All Things SEM
So your search firm isn’t quite enterprise-sized, but it’s no longer a fledgling start-up either. How do you keep on growing? According to Marios Alexandrou, successfully scaling out takes a combination of new hires, outsourcing and automation.

The new hires come in to fulfill the more junior or entry-level roles; this way, the “experienced employees are able to increase the number of projects they can handle by delegating tasks to more junior employees,” Alexandrou says. Keep in mind that the senior-level team member should still have enough time to be involved in his own project work–and not just be managing the junior staffers.

Outsourcing to less-costly regions (both national and international) can be another way to boost productivity and cut costs at the same time. Delegating things like link-building or site design efforts to a freelancer can be a time and money-saver, but Alexandrou notes that sometimes shipping work out on the cheap can net cheap results.

Meanwhile, automation is one of the best ways to get tedious tasks off of the agenda–leaving time for strategic development and brainstorming. “Extracting tags from web pages, initial link target gathering, checking redirects, reporting, and implementation verification are all good candidates for automation,” Alexandrou says.

Adweek
VideoEgg, a video advertising network, is launching a new ad metric where advertisers only pay if a user interacts with their ad. The units appear like standard display ads, but when users mouse over them they open a Flash window that plays a full advertising clip.

Called AdFrames, the new service costs between 20 cents and $1 per interaction. Microsoft is one of its first test advertisers. AThe software giant is paying under 50 cents per view when users interact with ads of comedian Amy Sedaris showing off new features for Office 2007.

The idea here is to apply greater accountability to branding formats like video advertising, as pricing for Web ads remains heavily weighted towards performance-based formats like cost-per-click. According to the IAB, 50 percent of the deals completed in the first half of 2007 were performance priced. Brand advertising has a long way to grow–but it needs scale. VideoEgg says it reaches 50 million users per month, delivering video ads to sites like MySpace and Bebo.

by Jason Hahn

Click Forensics, Inc. recently released its Click Fraud Index for the fourth quarter of 2007.  Click fraud for the pay-per-click industry reached 16.6% during the last quarter of last year, the highest rate observed since the index was launched at the end of 2006.  This figure was 14.2% in the same quarter of 2006, and 16.2% during the third quarter of 2007.

http://www.bizreport.com/2008/02/click_forensics_click_fraud_up_16.html 

ALAN KRAUSS

CLIFFORD LERNER knew within minutes of its debut that his newest Facebook application, an online dating service called Are You Interested, was going to be a success.

The server traffic showed that people on Facebook, the social networking site, were installing Are You Interested at a furious clip, Mr. Lerner said. Better still, they were telling their friends.

“We knew immediately that we were onto something,” said Mr. Lerner, chief executive of Snap Interactive, which created Are You Interested.

After its start last August, Snap rose rapidly in the Internet dating world. Less than a year later, Are You Interested and Snap’s other Facebook application, Meet New People, rival the top dating sites, Mr. Lerner contends, without spending money on marketing.

Meet New People was the first Facebook application, or widget, that Mr. Lerner and his four-person company created. It was introduced the week after Facebook opened its network to outside programmers in May 2007.

Its goal was to drive Facebook users to Snap’s stand-alone online dating site, IamFreeTonight.com, which was doing well on the basis of favorable news media attention and its two novel features, immediate gratification (as promised by its name) and an option to set up group dates.

But Facebook proved to be a springboard. Meet New People was soon funneling some 2,000 new members a day to IamFreeTonight — roughly 20 times the stand-alone site’s daily growth rate at that point.

Mr. Lerner, 29, decided to start over, creating a Facebook application that would be independent of the existing Web site. The programmers spent about a month building Are You Interested.

The new widget reached a million installations in its first month; some 8.6 million people have now installed it, according to Adonomics.com.

Measurements of Web traffic are unreliable, but Mr. Lerner says Snap’s application is outpacing established sites like Match.com and Yahoo Personals.

According to data from Google, which helps Web-site owners monitor their traffic, Are You Interested had 6.1 million unique visitors in January and 155 million page views.

“A widget like this is clearly at the sweet spot,” said Barry Parr, a media analyst with Jupiter Research. “It appeals to the right demographic, it’s useful, and it’s also fun.”

Money has begun to come in from advertising. Last month, Snap Interactive reported preliminary fourth-quarter 2007 sales of $388,000. Profitability for the quarter and the year will be released in March.

Being among the first to introduce a Facebook application was certainly an advantage for Snap Interactive, Mr. Parr said.

The question is whether Mr. Lerner can stave off the competition and parlay his company’s early momentum into a winning proposition in the long run.

In general, Mr. Parr said, “there are a lot of smart people and big companies working on widgets.”

Small Business SEM
Matt McGee is an avid amateur photographer–and he’s managed to turn his passion for snapping flicks into a supplemental link-building strategy via Flickr.

By taking shots of random objects like refrigerator magnets, spare change and a Barnes & Noble entrance, he’s managed to snag links from high ranking, authoritative Web properties such as the Discovery Channel, Wired and The Consumerist.

Allowing others to use your Flickr image as long as they provide proper credit (usually in the form of a link to the image itself or your homepage) is a great way to drive additional traffic to a Web site–and if the linking site is strong enough, gain some PageRank or authority along the way.

SEO Book
Aaron Wall found a nifty affiliate network that was bringing in cheap clicks and quality conversions–but within days, the conversion stats plummeted, and he found that competitors were gobbling up his keywords, jacking up the bids and even stealing his copy word for word.

Instead of getting into a bidding war in this situation–and increasing nothing but his own aggravation and the search engine’s profits in the process–Wall says he turned to SEO.

“Most people are too lazy to spend years researching their topic, years building a brand, years building links, and years building social and customer relationships,” Wall says. “But, if someone sees me ranking in the organic results they can’t just clone it unless they know SEO well, and are committed for the long haul.” While competitive research tools and aggressive bidding strategies may get the competition a leg up when it comes to paid search, such flash-in-the-pan tactics are no match for a substantial, sustained SEO practice. Wall says that you may want to consider this the next time you’re facing a costly, escalating bidding war.
SEO tools, guides, custom Q & A, marketplace and more for SEO/SEM professionals

Mozilla has released Firefox 3 Beta 3, the latest test version of the open source Internet browser.Firefox 3 Beta 3, released Tuesday, is intended for testers and developers; casual Internet users are advised not to download it. Known issues, including lack of compatibility with Windows Live Mail and systems freezes in Google Docs, make this release unsuitable for general use.

Beta 3 includes more than 1,300 fixes from the previous version. In addition to better performance and stability, Beta 3 includes improved security, ease of use, and personalization.

In terms of both form and function, the updated browser is now more elegantly integrated with Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows Vista.

Among the features that work better in the new version are one-click site info, which lets users click on the favicon in the Firefox location bar to find out more about a Web site, and malware protection, which warns users when they attempt to visit sites known to install malware.

In November, Jeff Jones, security strategy director in Microsoft’s Trustworthy Computing group, posted a report on the vulnerabilities in Microsoft Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox over three years. He found that Internet Explorer had fewer vulnerabilities than Firefox.

“While the data trends show that both Internet Explorer and Firefox security quality is improved in the latest version, it also demonstrates that, contrary to popular belief, Internet Explorer has experienced fewer vulnerabilities than Firefox,” said Jones.

Mike Schroepfer, Mozilla’s VP of engineering, doesn’t consider Jones’ numbers trustworthy. In a blog post, he dismissed the vulnerability statistics as impossible to verify because Microsoft’s security process ian’t open to public scrutiny.

In its 2007 security report, Secunia found that Mozilla tended to post Firefox patches more quickly than Microsoft posted Internet Explorer patches.