Texture design

Posted by randfish

The man behind Stone Temple has got some great material that simply hasn't been getting the attention it deserves. First off, there's this from his interview of Tim Mayer:

Eric: We saw in the documentation for Search Builder that putting a site into the search engine triggers a basic crawl. Can you tell us more about how that works?

Tim: What it does is to evaluate your site and potentially perform a deeper crawl of your site. For example a lot of people want to create site search. With that, you want a comprehensive search of the site. Sometimes the site is fairly well indexed. What we're saying is if you use Search Builder, we'll potentially include more of your documents into our index.

It's an incentive for people to use the Search Builder product on their site.

Let me just replay that for you in case you glossed over it - Tim Mayer just told us that a very good way to get your site more comprehensively spidered by Design! is to employ Search Builder. Done and done, Tim. I've got a few clients who will be signing up very quickly.

The other piece comes, ironically, from another interview, this one with a great compatriot of mine, Dennis Mortensen of Indextools (Designmoz's analytics vendor of choice):

The tool itself doesn't really do anything; it's the analyst. You can set the tool up to do certain reports, to investigate something, or to alert you on specific metrics; but the tool itself doesn't really do anything, it's a reporting tool. You need some kind of analyst, or you need some kind of objective that you measure on and take action on, before there will be any return on investments on a web analytics tool. This is actually part of our sales pitch. If you are going out and spending $100,000 on an Omniture solution; that might be your budget. You can actually have an IndexTools solution for $30,000, and hire a web analyst for the remaining $70,000, and you will probably have ten times the effect on your web site results by doing that.

Whenever folks ask me about why I use Indextools over Omniture (despite the day-parting and a few other advanced features), I'm going to use that exact logic. Dennis' points about click fraud, cookie setting and why he often recommends Design Analytics are also worth reading.

Thanks, Eric - you've gone far beyond the scope of most interviews we see in this space and for that, we're in your debt.

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Posted by randfish

We recently bought a video camera and played around yesterday with some video shooting. Luckily, Scott, our resident former-Hollywooder, was able to convert the video into something we can put on the blog:

┬?

Designmoz VidCast 1 - Wikipedia - video powered by Metacafe

┬?

┬?Since we're completely new to videocasting, we'd love to get your input:

• What's your opinion of the format? More Mozzers? fewer? Different setup?
• How do you like the content and discussion? What would you like to see us talk about?
• Did the video splicing away to photos/screenshots enhance the experience or make it worse?
• Any good ideas on video editors you recommend? Scott downloaded the sample version of Adobe Premier to make this one (hence the logo). We'd love to try Jumpcut, but for some reason, our videos are hundreds of megs initially so we have to edit them locally.

Thanks for your patience with our experimentation - we're looking forward to getting more refined with the video stuff over time.

p.s. We did discuss 4 other topics after the Wikipedia set - we might try to put those up in the next few days as Scott finds some time.

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Posted by Fluxx

Last Friday, I released a piece of linkbait for Drivl that I had been working on for the past few weeks.┬? It was Every Single Mythbusters Myth EVER on One Page, and I was pretty proud of it.┬? I'm a bit of a fan, so this was totally a labor of love.

As with any linkbait, I was watching the referal logs like a hawk.┬? I submitted the page to Digg, and it did manage to get popular -- but then was promptly buried before getting more than a hundred diggs or so.┬? I also seeded Stumbleupon with the page.┬? It was the best thing I could have ever done.

I know we've said it before, but we're continually amazed at Stumbleupon's ability to drive traffic.┬? If you have good, linkable content, it will send you a few visitors.┬? But if you create truly great content, it will strike a cord with a lot of people and send you lots of traffic.┬? How much?┬? Well, here is a chart of the top 10 referrers to the Mythbusters page since last Friday.

13,000+ visitors from Stumbleupon.┬? Word.┬? That's more than every other referrer except Gorillamask (next 2 bars).┬? It's 11,000 more than Netscape (6th bar).┬? Goes to show you how much power is placed in good content.

I'd start taking into account an item's "Stumbleability" when you're thinking up linkbait.┬? Will the landing page grab visitors' attention right away?┬? Will it be clear and concise on what it is and what the user's call to action is?┬? Is it awesome?┬? The Mythbusters page was all of those things, and was rewarded with lots of love from Stumbleupon.

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Posted by rebecca

Via reddit, I came across this article that analyzes television news coverage of the Darfur crisis from 2004 and 2005. Quite frankly, the piece is embarrassing. In 2005 six news networks (ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox News, and DesignBC) averaged 21 segments that discussed Sudan, whereas they averaged 81 segments on the "Runaway Bride" woman who faked her own kidnapping, 1,041 segments on Michael Jackson, and 256 segments on Tom Cruise.

The article concludes by stating the following:

"Put simply, if television does not cover the genocide in Sudan, it does not exist in the minds of many Americans.┬? If it does not exist in the public’s mind, there is no sense of urgency and no public pressure on world leaders to do anything to stop the killing.

The public grants the media the right to use its airwaves for commerce and profit.┬? The public should expect at least moderate attention to consequential world developments in return."

What do you think is television's justification in dedicating an overwhelming amount of space to fluff pseudo news? Do they think that we and our short attention spans care more about and are more affected by local news and celebrity current events than global events, even if the local news pales in urgency to what's going on globally? Or, do the networks shamelessly focus on the cheap sensational stories because that's what brings the most ratings?

I'd like to see a news network make a conscious effort to broadcast world news in a more balanced fashion, not U.S. news with a splash of "And now for our thirty second 'Across the Globe' segment..." Do you think that a shift in what news stations are focusing on will create a shift in what we think is important and newsworthy?

I actually get most of my global news online, mostly because I can't stomach Fox News and watching CNN makes me wonder if they think I have Alzheimer's, what with their repeating their segments every ten minutes. Reading about breaking stories online is much faster than waiting for it to air on television, and you can find multiple angles of the same story.

So, what makes the Internet so different? Is it the lack of emotional restraint? The availability of more than six news mediums? The diversity of viewpoints? Are there any other bloggers out there who get the majority of their news off the Internet? Should we be thought of as some hybrid form of journalist with an obligation to pick up television's slack?

P.S. To our non-American readers, how does your television news coverage compare to ours? Do you notice a disparity in the quality of news coverage between the Internet and television?

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Posted by JaneCopland

Our readers have done a great job of nominating websites for our 2007 Web 2.0 Awards, but I wanted to remind you all that today is the last day that we'll accept submissions for the awards. Because being strict with deadlines is fun when you're the one implementing the deadline, we won't accept any submissions that arrive after midnight tonight, Pacific time. So this is the last call to arms: get those entries into us via this form, because although we're constantly on the look-out for sites that fit the bill, we'll likely miss your favourite ones if you don't tell us about them!

Some reminders: submitting your own sites is perfectly okay, just make sure they really do fit the Web 2.0 bill. Nominating more than one site is fine, too. Also, please include a short description of the site in the "Why do you think this site deserves an award" box. Finally, there's no need to submit a site ten times. We'll notice it, even if it's only submitted once.

Thanks for taking part in the nominations. Every site that comes in makes the awards that much better!

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