WebWord

How to Make Your AJAX Applications Accessible – 40 Tutorials and Articles

Lead users take innovation to the extreme

MySpace Can Go Die

Cellphone talkers as bad as drunk drivers

Google’s strategically high failure rate

Wise Words About Branding From The Usability Sage

The Confluence of Research and Practice in Information Architecture

Guiding Principles for Providing “Remember Me” Personalization

The Battle Between Usability and User-Experience

AJAX and Web 2.0 is dying

Goal Based Information Retrieval Experiences

Complexity causes 50% of product returns

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From the archive…

28-June-2004

Premium usability: getting the discount without paying the price

29-June-2005

A unique usability technique?

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Insanely Popular?

UPS: Arrival, Arrival, Departure, Arrival, Departure… (31 comments)

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WordPress Technical Skillz…

Find Your Most-Commented Blog Categories in Wordpress

WordPress Plugins

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Get up to speed…

How Much Effort Does It Take to Create a Great User Experience?

Is Google Advertising Evil?

A Usability Review of Digg.com

The 7 Steps That Guarantee Victory on Large Projects

The Blake-Mouton Sales Grid Video

Found and Lost (Stay Ahead of Google and The Future of Search)

Website Forums and Blog Comments Post Prostitution

It is becoming increasingly important to manage your reputation because reputations are the true currency of the internet. If your reputation is poor, you won’t sell products, you won’t easily establish personal relationships, and you won’t be able to get a job. What other people say about you is far more important than what you say.

There are three levels to consider:
1. Awareness: You have a reputation and it is an “object” on the web
2. Monitoring: You can watch and follow your reputation online
3. Management: You can take action to adjust or update your reputation

Many people simnply don’t have awareness that they have reputations. For example, many students share images and stories that cast them in a very negative light. This information shapes reputations. In the past, distributation of this information was limited, limiting the possible reputation damage. Similarly, the life of the information was also limited due to literal media decay, forgetfulness, or simple lack of storage.

Today, the story is quite different. Nearly every bit of digital information online is permanently stored and it is widely available, if not widely distributed. For older generations, this is quite shocking. For younger folks, it is a way of life. I would offer that older generations are too conservative in this respect while the whippersnappers allow too much free flow. The balance has not yet been struck.

No matter how you slice it, too many people are carelessly exposing personal information. This includes material such as financial information, political views, personal relationships, and career changes. There’s so much that we expose. For the sake of clarity I’m going to stop short of diving deeply on this. Suffice it to say, we give a lot away for free.

A hidden factor of reputation management is knowing what others are saying about us. That is, most people only think about what they are saying and doing, versus what others are saying. The crucial fact is that it is impossible to manage your reputation without understanding what others are saying.

With all this as background, here is my list of reputation management tools. My assumption is that you have a list of keywords or phrases to follow. This would include your name, including variations on your name such as nicknames. You probably also have a list of URLs to monitor as well. Keep them handy. Further, if you are a business owner, recognize and keep in mind the words and labels associated with your products and services. You might also consider other material to monitor such as geographical information, former employees, professional associations, and the like. The bottom line is to think about your associations and where you fit in the world.

1. Search Engines

2. Blog Search, Blog Pulse

3. Del.icio.us

4. Technorati

5. Alexa

6. RSS feeds

7. Domain Name Check

8. MySpace, Facebook

9. Google Base

10. eBay Profiles and Items

11. YouTube, Google Video

12. Amazon Wishlist

13. Credit Score

14. Wikipedia References

15. Google Answers, Yahoo Answers

16. Truth Laid Bear

17. PubSub

18. Google Alerts

19. Blogdigger

20. Blogstreet

21. Consumating

I’m happy to announce the launch of Found and Lost:

“A controversial video by John S. Rhodes revealing the future of search, why failure drives success for Google and Yahoo, and how search ultimately molds the way we act, feel and think.”

The entire video report is nearly 4 hours long and represents my thinking on the future of search and how to stay ahead of Google, Yahoo and others. I’m not exaggerating when I say that I cover material that is unique and innovative. This is fresh.

Found and Lost is a fusion of my thoughts, ideas and speculation. I’ve spent many hours on this report. And honestly, if I presented this material to an audience or corporate client I would need to charge several hundred dollars for it. Instead, I’m trying to keep this affordable for everyone. The entire report is a bargain at $17.

You can download the first 15 minutes of Found and Lost absolutely free. There are no strings attached.

Get it now!

(Reference: Part I, Part II)

Here’s my final posting (Part III) on the topic of paying for blog comments, at least for now. I’ll keep it short and sweet.

I think that one of the best ways to pay back others is to continue writing great content. That is, make your content worthy of great comments.

On a more personal level, I think that you can pay others back for comments by sending them personal emails. I’ve done this for years. It is a lovely way to forge relationships and build friendships over time. Pay people back by being human. This might also mean sending postal mail. If you have the time and energy, and if you really want to make an impact, put your personal note in the mail. Write the note, address the envelope, and send it off. Magic!

Kim Krause Berg brought new energy to the topic over on the Cre8asite Forums. I read through the postings and then decided to interview myself.

Here’s the story. Dave Child has created some great cheat sheets (e.g., World of Warcraft, CSS and mod_rewrite). The cheat sheets are totally free. Kevin Futter found out that someone was selling the cheat sheets on eBay, without permission. Ouch.

Rather than simply fire off invectives, I thought about this for a few minutes. I realized this is an important illustration of the need for reputation management. I quickly collected my thoughts and posted a comment on Dave’s site.

Do you wish you knew what other people what saying about you on the web? Do you wish you had an easy way to keep track of your content on the web, to ensure that other folks aren’t stealing your thoughts? Do you wish that you had a way to clearly understand your reputation and influence on the web?

As far as I know, there aren’t good tools to do this. I’ll just say that I think this is a wonderful business opportunity. I’ve got some ideas on how I’d engineer the solution but I can’t give everything away for free, right? ;-)

PART ONE

I have to say that my expectations for Google are extremely high. They get higher all the time. Further, my technical expectations are through the roof. I’m saying that I expect flawless execution, even with beta products.

Am I being fair? Probably not. But folks, isn’t Google supposed to be wonderful? I believe that other people hold Google to higher standards. Here’s some evidence:

Google shareholders praise management
How do I love Google? Let me count the ways
Google Is God

PART TWO

With all of this said, I was very disappointed to find a simple usability bug with a non-beta (!) Google Service; Google Personalized Homepage. The “bug” translates to an actual end user failure. Here it is:

http://www.google.com/ig yummy…

vs.

http://www.google.com/IG failure!

I’m probably being harsh but given that these guys are technically brilliant, this is a let down. The argument might be that “http://www.google.com/ig” is a shortcut to some other long and nasty URL. I’d buy that as an excuse. Unfortunately “http://www.google.com/ig” is the root URL.

PART THREE

I think that what I’ve found is interesting. Maybe very interesting to some Google voyeurs or insiders. You never know, right?

Here’s a set of questions: How long will it take for someone from Google to find this posting, review the merit of making the technical change (should be drop dead easy), and then make the change? Further, will they post a comment here saying why it was broken and how it was fixed? Will they decide to even fix it? Will they fix it but do it in stealth mode?

I realize that my posting here translates to a small, tiny, insignificant request for Google. That’s exactly why I’m bringing it up. I’m a speck, but do I still matter to Google? Will they validate my existance and my feedback?

We’ll see. The clock’s ticking.

p.s. Terrible error handling: “The requested URL /IG was not found on this server.” Sheesh.

Yesterday I discussed how to pay for blog comments. My answer was pretty simple. If people post comments on your blog, and they also have a blog or forum, visit their site and post comments.

In my case, I promised to write three (!) blog postings for every posting on WebWord. That seemed pretty fair to me. I’m happy to say that since yesterday, I’ve “Paid It Back” to six different people. I think that my comments were interesting and useful, but maybe not. In any event, here’s where I’ve gone:

http://www.symplebyte.com

http://investorgeeks.com (…and related)

http://allaboutusers.wordpress.com/

http://www.myneatsite.com/blog/

http://chittahchattah.blogspot.com/

http://jerz.setonhill.edu/weblog/ (Did they stick?)

Quick sidebar: I need to write something up about blog posting validation. In effect, different sites are using mechanisms to prevent blog spam. More on that some time in the future…

So, here’s another way to reward blog postings. As Steve Portigal says, what I could do is add and update a blogroll to my site which is adjusted based on comments being posted. I like the idea but it raises the issue of “Me Too!” postings as well as blog spam. (Ugh.)

And here’s yet another way to reward (good) blog postings. If you’ll notice above, I explicitly linked to six different web sites. I can guarantee that will drive at least a small amount of traffic. Further, given my Google Page Rank of 6 (reasonable but not outrageous), this could bump traffic from follow up searches in the future. Put another way, you can simply pay others back with links. Isn’t the web beautiful?

So, we now have at least three non-financial payment models:
1. Scratch my back with postings, I’ll scratch yours with postings.
2. Scratch my back with postings, I’ll include you in my blogroll.
3. Scratch my back with postings, I’ll link to your site.

What sayeth WebWord readers?

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Update: Digg This Story! (Thanks, Jason)

Puzzle: How can I reward people who post comments on WebWord? This matters because I feel that the value of WebWord drammatically increases when people comment. I almost always learn something new from people dropping comments here. How do I return the favor without literally spending money?

Here’s my answer…

If you have posted a comment on WebWord recently, and you have a blog with commenting turned on, please be aware that I’ll visiting your web site and posting comments. In fact, for every posting on WebWord, I’ll trying to post three comments on your blog. This is my payment to you. It is my way of saying thank you. I can’t wait until you come back to WebWord and post again.

I’m in a hotel room that is fine; plenty of lights, clean bathroom, big bed. It even has a working iron, free high speed internet access, and a big TV.

What this room lacks, which most rooms lack, is good access to electricity. There is some sort of contraption under the desk in a hard to reach spot which yields six sockets. However, they are side by side, which means by using one, you really use two. And, if you’re like me and your techno widgets utilize bigger-than-normal plugs, then one plug will really eat up three sockets.

Remember, this is all happening under the desk. So, when one device is charged up, I have to crawl under the desk, pull out one or two plugs, adjust everything, and pray that I can insert the new plug. Under the desk, I get to snuggle up with dust bunnies and wispy cobwebs.

Am I alone or is this a problem for everyone?

1. Team members can set up social bookmarking pages for personal and professional access. Think of this as a way to offer everyone asynchronous collaboration. Or, think of this as a way to store “memories” of pages, including tags and other reference material.

2. Social bookmarks can allow people to find each other. Think of this as search and discovery. Think about this as a pre-collaboration tool. That is, you can’t collaborate until you first find others in your space.

3. User created tags offers other team members new ideas. More importantly, tags demonstrate a way of thinking about and organizing the world. Tags reveal perspectives and personalities. That in turn helps teams.

4. Social bookmarking pages maintained by multiple team members can be useful for running and guiding projects. Timing, personalities, and more, can be less important or more important depending on the project because they are independent from each team member. Tags can provide new facets to the same information. Likewise, tags can provide the same facet to different information.

5. Finally, tags can actually lead or train others. Certain tagging habits or characteristics can actually drive leadership and mentoring. Like writing or speaking or coding, tagging can be considered a special skill. Tagging is language oriented, certainly, but it takes different skills to be a great tag master.

Taken together, these social bookmarking and tagging ideas can help your team understand itself better. Social bookmarking can help others discover, publish, and share much easier than just a few years ago.

Here’s some of the sales and advertising language used by the Marriott Vacation Club:

“Put the lid on a significant family expense.”
(Protect your loved ones; appeal to fear.)

“Your ownership helps hedge against vacation inflation.”
(Act now or you’ll suffer.)

“Over the course of a lifetime, you’ll pay increasingly higher room rates and you’ll get less for your money.”
(Pay now or pay a lot more later.)

“78 Years of Service”
(We’ve been doing this a long time. This is a sure thing.)

“I trust that you will find Horizons to be not only a great place to stay, but also a great place to play.”
(Have confidence and trust us.)

“Children Spell Love … T-I-M-E”
(Tugs on your heart; appeal to emotion.)

“…how we spend that time is one true measurement of our success.”
(It’s only money. Trade a little money for something priceless: time.)

Manipulating language or good advertising?

Elizabeth F. Loftus and many other researchers have explained false memories, which are memories for events that didn’t happen. False memories are also classified as distortions of factual events.

There’s some really cool research that roughly goes like this. Different groups of people are shown the exact same picture of an automobile accident. After they are shown the picture they are asked a question. For the sake of simplicity, imagine there are three groups. Each person in each group is asked to estimate the speed of a vehicle in the accident. These are their respective questions:

Group 1: How fast was the car going when it bumped the other car?
Group 2: How fast was the car going when it hit the other car?
Group 3: How fast was the car going when it smashed the other car?

Although everyone saw the exact same picture, there were statistically significant differences between the groups. Specifically, Group 1 estimated a lower mean speed than Group 2, and Group 2 estimated a lower mean speed than Group 3.

What does this mean? The language we use really matters. It shapes outcomes. Words change our perceptions. What we hear and what we say can bend reality. This is not trivial.

In the experiement described above the language changed, nothing else. The context was exactly the same until just a single word changed everything. One word changed the world.