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Resource … Monday? – August 9, 2010

Jeff Burkholder — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 14:17:55 +0000

Teamwork, Statistics, Signup Forms, Blacklists, and More!

Due to vacations, conferences, and the like, we decided to push off Resource Friday and move it to Monday. We were all looking forward to it. Who knows, this might be the first step in rehabilitating Mondays! Soon, people could be saying, “Y’know, I don’t understand why these old Garfield cartoons are always so down on Mondays, when we all know it’s the best day of the week!” They could be going to Sunday morning brunches, anxiously counting down the hours until Monday rolls around again. We could all be saying, “TGIM!” …Nah.

Part of the team

Steve Wolgemuth, Principal

Today at resource Friday I asked three questions to stimulate thought about some subjects that I wanted my team to be thinking about. I warned in advance that all three of these could trigger very long conversations that we wouldn’t be having. The first question pertained to YDOP: “If YDOP would go out of business, what would be missing in the world?” The answer to this question helps us to connect to our bigger purpose. The second question: “If you left YDOP today, could you be replaced?” And, “what efforts could you make to change your involvement at YDOP to make yourself irreplaceable?” The third question: “Can you easily think of things that YDOP has that you/we haven’t directly worked for?” And, “are you maintaining the discipline of gratitude?”

They were heavy, but inspiring topics – and we look forward to unpacking them together.

Not wishing to let the team down, I brought more than questions – much more in fact, as I has just had the amazing privilege of hearing Terri Kelly talk about her job as CEO of W. L. Gore and Associates. (Ever hear of GoreTex?) I explained the culture of Gore that was needed to maintain a climate of innovation. They kept a smaller feel to each location in order to maintain a collaborative, peer based leadership model. The Gore family created an environment where innovation was nurtured by encouraging members to help each other become all that they could be, focusing on the work environment and belief in the individual. I explained that Kelly’s example of Gore was especially inspiring to me as it modeled many attributes of YDOP’s culture now in our early years. I’m really grateful to be working with such an awesome team in a great work environment. Who gets to say that these days!?!

Quick hits on social media

Daniel Klotz, Social Media Strategist

Facebook has announced August 23 as the day custom tabs shrink to 520 pixels, which is the standard we’ve been designing to for the past two months.

As social media users get more overwhelmed by the sheer volume of information they are expected to digest, tools like Feedera help the most-shared content rise to the top and appear in your inbox in a concise daily e-mail.

Google has enabled users to switch between accounts with two clicks, offering an alternative to the tactic of using two different browsers for two different user names.
Nielsen released data reflecting that the share of time U.S. Internet users spend on social networks has increased 43% over one year ago. Average users now spend 23% of their online time on social networks.

No lies, just statistics

Jeff Burkholder, Engineer/Analyst

I talked to the group about an analytics service that not only provides realtime stats (that is, see how many people are logged into your site right now, but also allows you to track individual user paths through your site, rather than giving you aggregated data, like Google Analytics. I’m doing some experimenting on this for now, but it’s something that I think could be useful for our clientèle.

I also talked briefly about why Email Open Rate is an increasingly bad statistic for marketing metrics. Largely, this stat is based on the number of times a call-out to a web-based 1x1px image that’s included in an email is accessed. Anytime someone opens the email, the image is downloaded, and the number of downloads is tracked as the number of times the email was opened. Except that most modern email programs don’t automatically open images anymore, but instead ask you if you want to download them. Also, people who do their emailing via text on a mobile device, or who look at the subject and snippet line of their email prior to actually opening anything would skew the numbers. People who monitor marketing metrics may want to start looking for a new method of tracking…

Sign Up!

Astrid Salim, Creative Director

Here at YDOP, we always try to make sign-up forms on the websites that we created as simple and less intimidating as possible. Dzineblog.com has a very nice a compilation of great sign-up forms which shows people that filling out a form doesn’t have to be a nightmare.

I think these are some great elements that you want to consider to have on your sign-up form on your website:

Neat and spacious fields (PSDThemes, for example). They make the form look more friendly.
Big and simple icons that indicate the fields, like the ones on Nibbledish They help the website visitor visually.
A little blurb on the form page about why people should sign-up.
Interesting or witty sentences on the form, like on PopScreen or Roboto
Alternative to captcha. Captcha that is not easily readable can frustrate people. So some of these websites use simple mathematical questions for the visitors to answer to avoid spam.

So, make your sign-up form interesting!

Spam and the blacklist

Mike Newswanger, Lead Programmer

As internet use and electronic forms of communication increase in popularity, spammers are sending more messages as well. While some email accounts get very little spam, others can be flooded with thousands per day. One reason for such a huge difference in number of spam messages received is based on email blacklists.

Many email providers will utilize one or more blacklist service to determine whether or not a message is spam. There are many ways that this is determined:

The sender or the sender’s domain has behaved in ways that would represent a spam server (i.e. many emails being sent out in a very short time)
The email message contains links to domains known to be fraudulent or inappropriate for web audiences
The email message originates from a domain known to be fraudulent or inappropriate for web audiences

If a message is flagged as spam by a blacklist, the message will be rejected by the receiving server, and the sender will get a message back. Note: There are also spam blockers that work on a rule basis on the receiving server and the user’s client, such as Outlook, that can catch emails based on the sender or content. These will not return an error to the sender.

Resource Friday – July 23, 2010

Jeff Burkholder — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 20:05:40 +0000

Bringing the Wii to Work, Logo Designs, Flipboard, and more

We’re slowly getting the band back together, as Jeff rejoined the team, fresh (or not so fresh, as the case may be) from his camping trip. This week, we really delved into the things that make us unique as individuals, and more powerful together than the mere sum of our parts.

Logo Design

Astrid Salim, Creative Director

LogoLounge.com is one of the websites out there where you can see a compilation of logo trends from year to year. In recent years, I’ve noticed more logos are going towards 3D effects and web 2.0 style. While they are appealing to the eyes, they might not be easily applicable to different media. One of the rules for creating a logo is that it should be easily used in web and print, or in full-color and one-color, and there is a good reason why it is a rule. The 2010 logo trend that I see on LogoLounge.com has been influenced a lot by colors and transparency. Then try converting these logos into one color (ie. screen printing, embroidery, logo on merchandise, etc). Most of the logos suddenly lose their identity and personality. Some people say that in this era, technology is more advanced and there is less need to make the logo one-color. While it is true that what used to be done in one-color now can be done in full-color, it is definitely going to cost the company more money.

On the other hand, we are in the process of updating the YDOP logo, and I have been working on the logo development. Our new face is coming soon, so stay tuned!

Long-Tail Blogger Outreach and Facebook Landing Tabs

Daniel Klotz, Social Media Strategist

Chris Abraham wrote an article recently for the Agencyside blog outlining his agency’s method for conducting long-tail blogger outreach. I shared with the rest of the team how we can incorporate his tactics into the blogger outreach work we already do, and how we can use our existing tools in the additional ways he suggests. I also pointed out the few tips in a new article on Facebook landing tabs that supplement the information and ideas Astrid has shared in past weeks.

Content Is King

Jeff Burkholder, Engineer/Analyst

For my Resource Friday a few weeks ago, I had talked about one of the new features of the latest build of Safari: Reader. Basically, this feature extracts the content and specifically related images from a webpage, and allows the reader to see it in a clear, uncluttered format, superimposed over the old one. This removes ads, styling, and anything else that can prevent the reader from seeing the article itself. Well, just this week, a company called Flipboard released an app for the iPad that does the same thing as Safari Reader for Twitter and Facebook. This app pulls in feeds from your accounts on those sites, as well as news, photos and information from all sorts of other sites, and puts it into a magazine-themed aggregator with an intuitive interface, but without all the different stylings and ads. I pointed out to the group that as these style-neutral aggregators become more and more commonly used, it’s going to be important to remember that the content on a website is just as key as the way it looks. Potentially, even moreso, as we move forward.

In semi-related news, I pointed out that most email programs, both online and off-, now feature snippets of the text of the email in the email list. Because of this, it’s becoming more and more important to make sure that your email starts out with something that will interest the reader, and not just “Having troubles seeing this message in your email?”

Super Mario Whiteboarding?

Mike Newswanger, Lead Programmer

In addition to its extreme gaming success, the Wii’s accessories are capable of much more than Nintendo’s limits. Brian Peek, a software developer, created a library in C# to interface with the Wiimote. This library takes advantage of the ability to pair across Bluetooth with a computer, and expands the functionality of the Wii Remote significantly. Some of the features available for polling are:

All input press and release events (aka user presses Up on the directional pad then releases)
3 Axis (including positive and negative results on each) values on the accelerometer to see which way the Wiimote is moving
IR sensor data (capable of tracking up to 4 IR points simultaneously at a resolution of 1024×768)
Access to controller add-ons such as Nunchuck data

By having access to this, many applications can be implemented through the Wiimote. One common application is a whiteboard, which can be set up using a Wiimote and up to 4 IR emitters (typically added to markers to give a natural feel) and a projector. The Wiimote faces the projector and provides an interface to the computer–very similar to how a mouse would work) by pointing at the Smart Board. It is moderately easy to implement and provides great functionality.

Google Wave will change business

Daniel Klotz — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 14:35:27 +0000

At first (and, OK, for weeks after that), Google Wave is hard to understand. It’s difficult to figure out how to use Wave, and it’s even harder to imagine how it might be truly useful.

Google Wave

At last night’s Central PA New Tech Meetup, I had the pleasure of facilitating a conversation about Google’s latest product with the brain trust of techies in the room, along with the meetup’s organizer, John Caddell. My goal was to get a feel from this group of fellow early adopters about what they like/dislike about Wave so far, and about what they see as the future implications of the technology.

Here are my takeaways on the question, Will Google Wave affect the way business is done?

Google Wave will change project management. It’s clear that Wave is superbly suited for small project teams who need to collaborate on projects, often in real-time.

Google Wave will change how we think about documents. Right now the paradigm within business is that a document is a document is a document. An after-action review, a set of product specs, an informal memo, and a legal contract are created, versioned, and stored in similar ways. The current way of thinking about, creating, and storing documents makes sense for things like contracts and records that are meant to become static. But that way of thinking is inadequate for documents about things like best practices, bios and CVs, and marketing research. Wave will prompt business to differentiate between “static documents” and “living documents.”

Google wave is the wiki for the rest of us. Enterprises currently attempt to create “living documents” (and a management/storage system for them) by setting up internal wikis. The problem is, getting a wiki up and running—and more importantly, getting people to actually use it—is difficult at best. Compared to a wiki, Google Wave is fun. Even if Wave is not completely intuitive and simple, it’s more intuitive and simple than a wiki. The impact of Google Wave on knowledge management should not be underestimated.

Google Wave reinvents the message board. Message boards, forums, and BBs have been falling out of favor throughout the past decade. They’re most alive in the tech community, but adoption within other sectors has fallen off. The similarity of a wave to a message board thread is close enough that Google Wave may make a good modern-day replacement for phpBB and other forum software.

Google Wave makes messages more social. Including someone new in a wave is easy and doesn’t require introductions, unlike adding someone to a conversation taking place between multiple people via e-mail. Wave also allows newcomers to the conversation to catch up by watching how the wave evolved over time, using the (really cool) “playback” feature. What’s more, if you find yourself in a wave with a participant you weren’t connected with before, adding them to your contacts (and thus, to your personal network) is a breeze.

What do you think? Are these predictions pie in the sky? Are there other ways you see Wave impacting business processes in the near future?