2006 February

Open Source CMS: Does Design Matter?

February 15, 2006 By Steve Borsch 1 Comment

Talk to a coder/developer…it’s the keystrokes that matter. Chat with a designer/artist…it’s the brushstrokes. Get the direct mandate from the leader responsible and accountable for the success of the Web asset itself…it’s both. The user cares that a site meets their needs and expectations — which continue to rise as the Web evolves — and unconsciously they expect the experience they have there aligns with the brand and values of the organization delivering it.

For several weeks, I’ve been involved in an analysis of open source content management systems (analyze for yourself at Open Source CMS or CMS Watch) for use at a client who will be delivering on one aspect of their strategy with a new Web asset. The most amazing part of this analysis has been getting a peek behind-the-curtain on these three projects and learn something about the teams and the ecosystems around the projects. If you think there are religious wars between Windows, Linux and Macintosh, you’ve seen nothing until you read threaded discussions or talk to people who have aligned themselves behind one of these projects!

Which one did I choose and why?

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Filed Under: Innovation, Open Source, Technology, Web 2.0

Balanced Brand: Find the Higher Ground

February 13, 2006 By Steve Borsch Leave a Comment

You are a brand. Whatever you do and who you are is your brand. If you, work, coach little league, volunteer, or blog, podcast, and deliver vlogs, you are delivering your brand value to the world. The essence of who you are, what you believe, and how you act on it, your reputation — is what you put into practice every day and how the world in turn reacts to your brand.

Do you have credibility? Are you full of hot air?

EXACTLY the same thing holds true for companies or organizations of any kind (including government). The messages people believe, possible purchase of products and services delivered, and willingness to even pay attention are commensurate with the essence of a brand. Is the organization putting a spin on the truth when confronted with a negative brand-affecting event? Are they delivering shoddy products or lukewarm services? Are they doing one thing but saying another?

A guy I know, John Foley, has written a book called Balanced Brand. I attended the launch party for the book and gained insight in to it even before reading it (Disclaimer: I’ll be helping out John’s new firm, Level, in the future). Then I read it.

Balanced Brand guided me to higher ground.

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Filed Under: Conversational Marketing

Typepad: A blogger’s friend?

February 11, 2006 By Steve Borsch 2 Comments

As blogging increases in value — and more people come online as evidenced in Dave Sifry’s State of the Blogosphere — giving people the tools they need is critical. Statistics on pageviews and referring pages that brought people to a post or a blog is one thing (as long as they’re working), but with the acceleration of use of news aggregators, it’s absolutely imperative that a blogger knows how many people have subscribed to their RSS feed and are reading posts through an aggregator!

Here are two examples:

1) Pageview/Referrer Stats: Typepad (my blog hosting provider) has had outages recently and their customer’s have not been happy. Though Typepad offered compensation after their first major outage, I find an amusing lack of transparency in this company and also a woefully inadequate use of the tools they sell. For example, their statistics have been offline quite frequently over the last several weeks. On January 26th, stats were down and they refer customers to a SixApart status page where it said this:

Jan 26, 2006
TypePad Service

We have temporarily disabled the display for visitor stats in the app. Status updates to follow.

Updated 1:26 pm PST

It was like that for 17 hours before I emailed Barak Berkowitz, Chmn/CEO of SixApart (though heard nothing). Why does this company not blog and keep their customers informed? Are they afraid of being found out that they’re not yet reliable or can’t really scale yet?

Stats are table stakes to be in the blogging game and bloggers need to know who is reading, where they’re coming from, what search strings in a search engine brought them there and more.

But there is another HUGE area where Typepad doesn’t even play!

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Filed Under: Blogosphere

A Gnomedex registration tale…

February 8, 2006 By Steve Borsch Leave a Comment

Want to tell you a tale of somebody doing the right thing and an interesting example of conversational marketing.

I’d registered for Gnomedex in Seattle and there had been an error on my part. My trip to London ended up at the end of June now overlapping the Gnomedex dates, and I informed Chris and Ponzi by email — 12 hours after registering and paying by credit card — that it turned out I couldn’t attend.

Apparently there was a non-prominent "no refund" clause on their registration page (still don’t know where) and they informed me by email that, unfortunately, they couldn’t refund my dough though they’d try to "fill my spot". Dismayed since I’ve been on my own since December and the $499 — while certainly not a big deal it nonetheless could be put to better use — I protested. We went back-n-forth by email several times. They saying we’ll try, but no…me pointing out the unreasonableness of it all and pleading my case.

This team is running something akin to an unconference and needs the dough for initial expenses and setup. There has been (and is now) a no refund policy. The stand up thing they did? Chris gave me the benefit of the doubt and, after further analysis of his own event site, concurred the no refund policy was non-prominent and agreed to the refund (and no, don’t try registering and backing out since the site now prominently displays: TICKETS CANNOT BE REFUNDED, ONLY TRANSFERRED).

This impressed me. Yes they put on a good event which is worthwhile in-and-of-itself, but the way this situation ended up demonstrates to me their integrity and values. It further proves to me why these two deserve our support, conference attendance, and my best wishes that they enjoy continued growth and success in their endeavors. I plan on attending next year (provided I’m in the country) and will certainly be following the blogosphere during the event.

Photo credit, Lockergnome

Filed Under: Conversational Marketing

Your own Virtual World

February 8, 2006 By Steve Borsch Leave a Comment

How would you like to be able to build your own virtual world? Run a virtual trade show, hold a conference, build a haunted house for Halloween, create events, hold customer events, perform sales pitches, the list is endless. My friend, Graeme Thickins, is out at Demo ’06 right now and has been posting about what he finds cool out there. Today’s post mentioned Multiverse, a Massively Multiplayer Online Game (MMOG)
or virtual world platform which you can use to build whatever world you can imagine.

I’ve spent time in Second Life and have enjoyed wandering around. I’ve been very reluctant to invest time and effort there, since I can see how easy it would be to become addicted! That still doesn’t take away from the fact that virtual worlds will be places where people’s consciousness is located. Maybe infrequently. Maybe often. But if you’ve tried virtual worlds in the past or you’re ‘living’ in one now, you can see how powerful the social interactions are within them. (Note: the most recent cool event was Stanford Law professor, Larry Lessig’s, lecture within Second Life).

What will these worlds look like 20 years from now?

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Filed Under: Innovation

Technorati: Making Sense of the Blogosphere

February 6, 2006 By Steve Borsch Leave a Comment

Though there are pretenders to the blog searching and conversation tracking throne — and most people discover my blog through a simple Google, MSN or Yahoo search — there isn’t a more solid and useful service than Technorati’s.

Everyone is posting today about Dave Sifry’s blog post about The State of the Blogosphere. While this is, without a doubt, incredibly enlightening, something more fundamental happened last week that most people have either overlooked or didn’t think all that important: Explore the Blogosphere on Technorati’s front page.

As I’ve been thinking more and more about how all of these blog ‘conversations’ and individual input within the blogosphere can be harnessed (i.e., clusters of affinity blogs, tags or a high level taxonomy), Technorati has a head start on all others. Though a first effort that will be refined over time, already it’s almost thrilling to be able to go to, say, Advertising and see listings of advertising-centric blog posts that are high in the rankings.

Go to Explore the Blogosphere and start to read, say, the top five posts in any given category. You’ll quickly discover that (for the most part) the high ranked posts are from thought leaders in any given category. Neat stuff and is a good way to get a feel for what the conversations are within these affinity areas.

Filed Under: Blogosphere

Connecting the Dots podcast for February 5, 2006

February 5, 2006 By Steve Borsch Leave a Comment

No…I’m not wearing a tinfoil hat but instead am connecting the dots. This week’s dots are U.S. intent on geopolitical, space and cyberspace dominance. The pieces are falling in to place to ensure that, over time, the ability to control (and perform surveillance on) the internet is achieved. Discussed in this podcast are the following:

* Project for the New American Century. The PNAC proposes to control the new “international commons” of space and “cyberspace” and pave the way for the creation of a new military serviceâ€”U.S. Space Forcesâ€”with the mission of space control.

* National Security Agency warrantless surveillance and the issues surrounding it and as a precursor to control of cyberspace.

* At Stake: The Net as We Know It. “(I)n a Nov. 7 interview with BusinessWeek Online, AT&T CEO Edward Whitacre Jr. declared: “What [Google, Vonage, and others] would like to do is to use my pipes free. But I ain’t going to let them do that.” Whitacre and AT&T argue that they need flexibility to exact a toll from Web services that hog bandwidth.”

* EFF Sues AT&T to Stop Illegal Surveillance: The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed a class-action lawsuit against AT&T Tuesday, accusing the telecom giant of violating the law and the privacy of its customers by collaborating with the National Security Agency (NSA) in its massive and illegal program to wiretap and data-mine Americans’ communications.

* Esther Dyson on CSpan discussing “The Future of the Internet“. Provides an interesting perspective on the internet, U.S. position and other countries lack of participation.

Download or listen to this week’s podcast

Filed Under: Current Affairs

Best Buy Hates Non-PC Users

February 2, 2006 By Steve Borsch 3 Comments

I don’t really think Best Buy Company (BBC) hates non-PC users, but I’m stunned that a mainstream retailer like BBC does not support web standards and thought I’d put in a provocative headline.

In typical short-sighted fashion, I discovered this evening that BBC’s Reward Zone program only supports Internet Explorer 5.x and above if you want to print off the rewards you signed up for and earned through purchases. You have a Macintosh? Tough. Linux box? What…are you some kind of geek loser? If you are the geek loser, just reboot in to Windows and use the insecure Microsoft browser, willya?

Wait a minute though. How about the discontinued IE 5.2 on Macintosh? Not supported. OK then, how about on the slowing, but still fast growing IE alternative, Firefox? Nope.

So BBC apparently doesn’t want a material share of the market to participate in their loyalty program. They’re walking away from the roughly 5% of the PC market that Apple represents as well as the >10% share that an alternative like Firefox represents. How is this somehow OK to BBC information technology management? (Even to the outsourced to Accenture I.T. leadership?).

Most importantly, how does this fit in to BBC’s “customer-centricity” effort?

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Filed Under: Commerce

Video distributed everywhere!

February 2, 2006 By Steve Borsch Leave a Comment

Let’s see…we’ve got iTunes, Google, You Tube, vSocial, Veoh and dozens of others in the video distribution game already…and now one of the broadcast networks (CBS) is getting in to it too.

Oh great…yet another place to go to find content. Another subscription. Another log-in. More fees. Enough already and we haven’t even started! But is there already a better way?

Om Malik discusses Mary Hodder’s new startup, Dabble, which is setup to be an aggregator of video content and more. Here’s the amusing thing: when I first read about Mary’s startup on Om’s blog, I chuckled to myself and thought, "Why in the world would I want an aggregator for video? Certainly one or two companies — like what happened with satellite DirecTV and DISH — will become THE dominant distribution hub."

I now see the opportunity. The ‘net will bring us a finite, yet enormous number of distribution points for moving images. Perhaps multiple mass distribution hubs and, eventually, narrowly focused ones will appear. Until then (and for quite some time), there will be a need for aggregation. I intend to do more investigation to discover if — in Mary’s startup — I’ll be able to aggregate content and turn around and publish my own aggregated feed. Now THAT would be powerful.

Filed Under: Innovation, Vlogging, Web 2.0