My brother was approached by a London based online marketing company to advertise on this personal website. He is a molecular biologist and content is all about exciting stuff like… nuclear processing to export, editing, splicing, translation, localisation and stability, RNA interference and non-coding RNAs.

They asked him to place some text in a specific paragraph of a specific page, linking to a health related website which has very little to do with what my brother’s content is about. Health and biology are related, but in this case distance cousins at best.

I got my brother to suggest an alternative position under a ‘Sponsored link’ heading and this is what they replied:

“As _____ only work with contextual, natural adverts, I would appreciate it if it’s not directly stated that our advert is an ‘advertisement’ by placing it under a sponsored link heading. We have found that a more discreet form of advertising is more successful than overt brand messages. I hope you understand.”

No S**t.

I wonder how much of this natural advertising is going on and what can be done to stop it.

Back in 2008 I re-launched Tablet PC Italia, my Italian-language website dedicated to Tablet PCs, making sure that it would work for users reading my articles in slate mode.

It was an interesting project and at times a bit tricky (as I’m no CSS god) but I did manage to achieve the 3 goals I set myself:

1. A layout that would work in both landscape and portrait mode
2. Give left-handed users option to switch the navigation menu from right to left
3. Design navigation so that things could be easily clickable using a stylus

Now, this was the era when tablet computing was predominantly pen based and touching a computer screen limited to the particularly perverted.

For my next iteration of the design (which should happen before the end of the year) I will have to cater for both styluses and much larger finger tips.

Is Tablet PC Italia an iPad-ready website?

So far it hasn’t been included in Apple’s list of iPad ready websites, so obviously Steve Jobs doesn’t think so.

But my own testing tells a different story:

The iPad’s resolution is 1024 × 768 pixels on a 9.7-inch screen. This also means that the maximum width in portrait mode is 768, which will not even fit those websites designed back in 2005 for 800 pixel widths.

But this is a non issue. All you need to do is to rotate the iPad in landscape mode and your problem is solved.

However, offering the option to view a site in the two orientations is not a bad thing. One advantage portrait has over landscape, and this is my own personal observation and preference, is that the tablet device is lighter to hold. Something to do with physics, I think. And there must be a reason why most mags are printed in this orientation…

Tips for designing for iPads

First of all you need to do what Apple say: support the latest web standards. What this really means is… don’t use Flash. Apple sure don’t like it. Now that I think of it, this must be one of the reasons why Tablet PC Italia will never be included in the aforementioned list. I’ve embedded far too many Google videos in it.

Think about using a liquid (or is it elastic?) layout that presents content neatly when stretched and pushed together. I ended up setting both a min and max width on my site after spending hours figuring out sizes of elements so that articles would still be neat and readable when squashed together.

Don’t forget that you will need to make navigational elements big enough for fingers of different sizes. Have that giant Chinese basketball player test your interface if you can. Position your navigation elements so that clicking things is not a) awkward and b) obstructs the user’s view.

Keep navigation simple so that the user doesn’t have to prod on the screen 100 times to find something. You wouldn’t want to have too many greasy fingerprint marks on your iPad’s screen. I predict that the state of one’s tablet device’s screen will become a more significant indicator of a person’s cleanliness than their hair, clothes, fingernails, etc…

Safari supports gestures and swipes too so think about how users can make the most of these. Perhaps they should be flicking through your pages rather than clicking links?

You can’t use a stylus on an iPad but you have the option to use a sausage instead. Will your interface work in Germany?

Can’t think of anything else at the moment but one I’ll start work on the re-design on my Tablet PC site I should have more tips to share. I hope to have an iPad to test the site with too, but I don’t think I can make a strong enough case to my CFO (wife) for one. Sigh.

Read WordPress’ About Us page and you’ll get an idea of how big they are:

[Wordpress]… has grown to be the largest self-hosted blogging tool in the world, used on millions of sites and seen by tens of millions of people every day.

They deserve it. Their product is as awesome as their commitment to improving it. WordPress has evolved from a blogging platform into a powerful CMS fit for many different types of websites.

WordPress is great for web designers with little programming knowledge that have clients that require a certain degree of customisation. For example, a business that needs a check out process that follows a particular path. For this purpose, though, Textpattern is much better.

Textpattern is the holy grail for web designers lacking programming skills

There are many of these around.

A client may ask…

I want a list of the 5 latest news items on the homepage, but the first one must feature an image and the other four as simple links. I don’t want any news items listed that are Press Releases, though, and it’s one from the Photos section it should also include its thumbnail.

This can’t be achieved in HTML alone, of course. A non-programmer would not be able to define such a dynamic.

Textpattern, instead, allows extensive control over dynamic content without the need for programming. It uses an XML-style tag system that is intuitive that looks more like HTML than PHP.

This tag, for example, lists 5 links to pages in the News section of a website that have been associated to a category called ‘Apples’. But only if the page that displays it is associated to a second category called ‘Red Fruit’:

<txp:if_article_category name=“Apples”>
<txp:article_custom form=“list.articles” section=“News” category=“Red Fruit” limit=“5” />
<txp:else />
<p>Sorry, there are no articles about apples.<p>
</txp:if_article_category>

The form=“list.articles” bit specifies the HTML code that will be repeated. It could looks something like this:

<p><txp:article_image /><txp:permlink><txp:title /> <br /><txp:category2 link=“1” title=“1” /></txp:permlink>

To output an article list comprised of a linked title, category and image.

Easy! Textpattern offers many such tags out of the box to allow for all sorts of behaviours. Tons more are available as plugins.

Google wants to make programming simple too

Hence, their efforts to provide such a language via a project called, rather appropriately, Simple.

With Google Sites, though, they’ve made things too simple too the extent that even a GeoCities (R.I.P.) website would have been more customisable.

I’m not a Google Sites expert, to be honest, but it seems to me they are trying to achieve a system where one can plug content and feeds into pages as ‘modules’. Isn’t iGoogle a bit like that?

The plan: Google to buy Textpattern and take on WordPress

Businesses are already using a whole bunch of Google products on their websites — AdWords, Google Maps, Analytics, etc… — so why not offer them a proper CMS too?

Textpattern would serve this purpose wonderfully.

When you read comments such as don’t just read The Times – listen to it, watch it, shape it, be part of it and Question our journalists in The Hot Seat in the context of a Murdoch publication that will be switching to some sort of subscription model then a degree of excitement is legitimate.

You can read more about the above here: www.timesplus.co.uk/welcome/index.htm

Pressure is on to deliver…

So the pressure is on to deliver on the promise of an online newspaper that engages beyond reader comments and the occasional video clip to justify readers parting with their hard earned cash.

In a previous post I argued that online newspapers need their own economy where users can earn, spend, invest and speculate as part of the experience.

In its most basic form this means rewarding those who contribute. Extend that by introducing a currency and you will allow all sorts of interactions.

Reward readers that contribute

Perhaps this is a bit far fetched and not quite in tune with an online newspaper’s core offer. But unless a paper like The Times rewards those who contribute they risk pissing them off. They need to do what YouTube did a while ago and ‘reward creativity’ via a revenue sharing scheme — the Partner program.

The new version of The Times will be live some time in May. It will be interesting to see if it sets a benchmark in terms of innovation and whether it will be good enough to justify paying for it.

I’ve just read Luke Fretwell’s post titled Why Gov 2.0 means the U.S. Government must centralize its Web operations and couldn’t agree with him more: it’s easier and cheaper to manage a single, well executed website than multiple ones ranging from very crappy to very good.

Cost is a major factor in this line of thought. Just think about how much it must be costing Governments to maintain multiple web teams doing the same thing 1,000 different ways and using god only knows how many different content management systems. Luke is spot on when he describes the end result as as ‘disjointed’, ‘inconsistent’ and ‘outdated’.

The Facebook model and why it’s good for Government

No doubt Facebook’s user experience has contributed to its success. It’s unobtrusive, clear and usable. Adverts are out of the way and the Facebook brand has a subtle presence.

Facebook has been designed to allow users to get things done, much like an operating system. Facebook is as much an office application (eg. a spreadsheet as it is a social network connecting friends.

So why is this a good model for a centralized Government website? Here are some of my thoughts:

1. It could be a single destination where all things Government (agencies, projects, news, data, profiles, etc…) are presented in a clear and consistent way
2. Citizen’s could voice their opinion as individuals or in groups. Voices could be heard, counted, aggregated and re-proposed as measurable data
3. The opposition would use the same platform, whether a traditional party or groups forming around shared thoughts
4. It would allow instant feedback on issues and, at some point in a more connected future, voting and referendums
5. It would offer useful applications (eg. to pay your fines online) and resources for anyone to develop and share their own. For example, an application could be developed to filter out spin from any Government communication
6. Government data could be shared raw or processed and presented via an application. Private companies could feed their own data into the system too.
7. It would be much cheaper to manage. No need to sack web professionals either — they could be re-trained to help people find information, moderate discussions, identify trends and report back on people’s sentiments
8. Closed areas would act as intranets offering the level of collaboration and knowledge sharing many Government agencies dream of today
9. Poke your elected representative functionality

Anything else?

No doubt there are cons to this line of thought. Security may be one of those as a single system may be harder to keep safe than many.

Earlier this month thousands of email accounts from providers such as Hotmail, Google Mail and Yahoo! Mail were compromised. If you haven’t heard about that you can read up about it on the The Times Online.

Microsoft blamed phishing schemes rather than breaches in their own system — We are aware that some Windows Live Hotmail customers’ credentials were acquired illegally by a phishing scheme and exposed on a website

Google’s statement started on a similar note — This is not a breach of Gmail security, but rather a scam to get users to give away their personal information to hackers.

Facebook should take some of the blame

And so should MySpace, Friendster and other social networks out there that feature email harvesting functions that require users to submit their email account’s login details. Such as Facebook’s Friend Finder function – Step 2 of the sign up process:

The system works like this. You enter your Yahoo! Mail login details, for example, and a Facebook script will extract email addresses from your contacts list and fire off an email inviting them to join Facebook too.

It is a useful tool, I admit, but a risky one for 2 reasons:

• Are we 100% sure that log in details are not being recorded? Perhaps some criminally minded engineer is recording all this info on a USB stick…
• If Facebook and Myspace are doing this people will think that it’s a standard feature for social networks and that it’s OK to share their login details. Would you do the same on some obscure site?

Ironically, Facebook’s prohibits this kind of thing

Point 4.6 of their terms states:

You will not share your password, let anyone else access your account, or do anything else that might jeopardize the security of your account.

I posed this question to Mozelle Thompson, a former TC Commissioner and a legal consultant at Facebook the other day (he was in town for a IAPP conference and gave a talk where I work) and his reply was that it is a very useful tool and that, ultimately, it’s user has a choice to use it or not. Not much of an answer.

Less marketing, more security

I doubt that social networks will want to give up such a viral tool so I’m wondering whether email providers can put a stop at this practice. Surely they’re unhappy about it?

Google has just confirmed that it is working on a micropayment system for Newspaper Association of America based on Google Checkout. This is good news for the industry and not-so-bad news if pricing will indeed be ‘micro’.

How about ‘micro earnings?’ No doubt that as user generated content becomes core to newspaper offerings we will soon start reading about reward schemes enabling people to earn access to content.

I know little about economy but these seem to be the basic ingredients of a market economy. So why not make things a little bit more interesting and allow that economy to develop? Here are a few ideas that may or may not work for an online newspaper:

• Establish a currency (eg. the New York Times dollars – $NYT) can be bought and sold and perhaps even tied to the value of the newspaper in terms of real $$$
• Allow members to earn $NYT by contributing content and posting comments (different rates would apply) and spend them buying access to content, features, games, etc… or even exchange $NYT between themselves
• Allow members to pool together and invest in the production of special reports and earn a % of the revenue the reports generate
• Establish affiliate schemes members can earn from
• Prize giveaways

This doesn’t sound too far-fetched if you’ve tried Second Life. If you haven’t, have a look at their market data.

Newspapers would generate revenue from selling content as well as taking a small % of every transaction. I wonder if this scenario would help create a stronger bond between the brand and the user too.

So what is Building43?

To quote their About us page again…

The goal is simple – make it easier for businesses to use the new Internet to improve their business results.

It’s a Rackspace owned website with a celebrity blogger at the helm of it — Robert Scoble. The ultimate purpose is to sell hosting, which is perfectly fine.

Scoble calls it a community too on his About page:

I work at Rackspace and am building a community for people fanatical about the Internet called Building43.

Don’t call it a community, please

Call me old fashioned by to me an online community still means a forum or chatroom where one can sign up and initiate discussion or participate in existing discourse, where your role is defined by what, how and how often you say things.

At Building43, instead, your role has been determined from the start:

But building43’s foundation and future is its community — people like you who contribute valuable content, through video, blog posts, podcasts, Friendfeed comments, Tweets or by simply dropping us an email to tell us about the latest or next great thing. Participate now. We can’t do it without you.

In other words, to participate you have to contribute content via the latest web 2.0 cleverness (eg. Twitter, FriendFeed). Which is more about social marketing that than giving users space to express themselves.

Building43 is a blog

It looks like one, reads like one and behaves like one.

And it would be great if they added a forum of some sort.

Now that I’ve made that clear I’ll go ahead and bookmark it because it promises to be a pretty useful resource.

A few years ago I signed up with IndexTools, a web analytics service similar to Google Analytics, and paid for a plan for up to 1,000,000 page views each month.

I wasn’t sure which plan to go with, though, as I didn’t know how much traffic was generating.

In the end traffic level averaged around 300,000 page views per month with the occasional spike. I never went over my quota.

I remember asking one of their sales reps why their pricing couldn’t be based on usage. The answer was that it was technically harder to do so. Hard to believe given measuring traffic is their business.

I’ve got the same issue now with a web agency I work with. We have an agreement for 6 hours of maintenance and support each month. The price is discounted and it guarantees specific turnaround times. Extra hours are more expensive and there is no agreement on turnaround times. Of course this could have been negotiated before signing on the dotted line, but certain agencies are not particularly flexible.

Selling ‘blocks’ of things is convenient if you are a supplier as you may well end up not providing 100% of what is offered. But not such a good deal for the client.

Pricing that scales based on the amount of service provided is much more fair. Think about this next time you’re negotiating with a service provider.

Online there are no bibliographies. We use links instead. However, I think there is a case for using them as an expanded function that goes beyond providing reference facts and acknowledgements.

Articles online aren’t so much different from the printed versions. This is also due to publisher’s clever use of resources to re-propose content in different formats. But apart from complementing content with links, commenting and the occasional widget there is little difference between what is published online and on paper.

Telling the story behind the story

This does not need to be the case as online, given the very nature of the medium, gives us the opportunity to tell the stories behind the story. For every polished article there are all sorts of scraps of information that originally provided the author with inspiration and material. This, along with the author’s own thinking and emotion contributes to the messy process of articulating an article.

So why not provide a bibliography of all the bits of information, thoughts and emotions that helped shape it? These could be inter-linked web pages, images, social network connections, twitters, statistical facts, video clips, emoticons, ecc… presented over some kind of timeline narrating giving the article a lot more context. Sharing and linking of these elements would provide an alternative route to navigate articles across a website.

Capturing inspiration

For this to work there would have to be some kind of software and / or gadget to allow authors to capture their inspiration. But the extra effort would mean creating additional content that could be, dare I say, monetised on. Could such bibliographies be what publishers charge for after offering the article for free?