Monthly archives: February 2008

This post talks about what kind of web user are you and points to the study conducted by Pew Internet and American Life Project. The complete PDF report can be downloaded here

# 8% of Americans are deep users of the participatory Web and mobile applications

# 23% are heavy, pragmatic tech adopters – they use gadgets to keep up with social networks or be productive at work

#10% rely on mobile devices for voice, texting, or entertainment #10% use information gadgets, but find it a hassle

# 49% of Americans only occasionally use modern gadgetry and many others bristle at electronic connectivity

How does this web user classification / typology help you : This can help you decide how should you meet the expectations of your users. Most importantly if would also tell you what to expect from your users. If you think you will launch a UGC site and all of your users will start contributing, it doesn’t happen at all. Only 2% of your users will actually post the content that you want, may be the Omnivores ones. Connectors would make your content popular and the Productivity Enhancers will pull that content from subscriptions. So you need to have tools and features that target these users. You don’t need to actually get into the minds of these users, you need to have features and tools that makes it all easier for you users to do what they want.

Met Tim Napoleon at Akamai’s user forum in Mumbai, yesterday. Tim spoke about the future of HD on web and how Akamai can help realize that. You can check out the HD web proof of concept on loveearth.com.

HDTV is defined by the industry to be video with significantly high pixel resolution of 1080i, 1080p or 720p. In the broadcast world, the industry is undergoing a series of transformations that are standardizing the delivery of high-definition video to the home. For the Internet, Akamai is making the HD web possible by continuing to refine the infrastructure required to bring the HDTV experience to online audiences. Additionally, Akamai will continue to lead this effort with new service launches, device integration, and partnerships with technology vendors, expected in the coming months. Akamai has architected its platform to comply with the following technical criteria that content owners must leverage to successfully enable an HD web. Akamai believes that it is the first and only platform to meet these technical requirements which include offering:

- Technology and an operational model to operate serving devices in the largest high-throughput networks around the world (servers need to be physically in the networks, as that is where the capacity lies)

- Established relationships with the largest high throughput networks Support for delivery, storage, and management of files greater than 2 Gigabytes

- Support of VC-1 and MPEG-4 video standards, achieving visual parity with other broadcast video networks Support for files with resolutions of 720p, 1080i and 1080p

- Client-side technology that is deeply integrated into its delivery system to be deployed as appropriate

Tim also shared some best practices for producing on demand video on web.Tim likes photography and spicy Indian food

Jemima Kiss writes :

User content is at the heart of Web 2.0, which has spawned hundreds of sites that encourage users to share, discuss and contribute their ideas, photos, videos and digital miscellany. Acknowledging and adapting to this trend has been a key challenge for traditional, professional media sites whose business models have relied on being a one-way, authoritative gatekeeper of information and content. City University’s senior journalism lecturer Neil Thurman has carried out four years of research into the uncomfortable relationship between traditional news organisations and user-generated content. Published last week, his report – ‘Forums for citizen journalists?’ – says that despite a heavy emphasis on UGC, the volume of response from users is typically very low and UGC is also a big drain on resources because of moderation and legal issues.

Talking about moderation issue raised in the study

The moderation is of course the most important issue on any news sites :The reaction to an abusive post is 100 times more on a reputed news site that a open forum or pure UGC sites. The news sites not only get flames from the regular pious users but also from the goverment, legal and sensorship authorities. A celebrity would not dare to sue a pure UGC site but would not leave if it a mainstream media company.

But still the benefits out weigh the demerits of having a UGC as in between you always have some gems who would offer you the true, genuine and unique insight to a particular topic or situation.

Outsource your moderation: Many news sites assign this double duty to their editors to moderate the content and comments. This is painful and not something an editor or media professional would enjoy. Instead of that one should device a policy, hand it over to outsourced moderator and focus on content and quality.

Pre and Post Moderation:There is no ideal method of pre-moderation or the post-moderation. One has to have both so that mistakes can be avoided and corrected. Also don’t fatigue a particular moderator on handling everything that you have. Have different levels of delegations in moderation process, so that you have a basic moderator for 1st level content filtering, 2nd level moderator who may only work on post moderation and other issues and the 3rd level of super-super moderator who acts as an arbitrator for any major disputes and issue with legal and users.

Kathy Sierra is my most favorite blogger so far. Infact, my blog is kind of inspired by her blog creation passionate users. Inspired by the name, I created my blog ‘how to make users happy‘. Unfortunately, she doesn’t blog now due to some reasons. But I am still under the awe of her brilliant content and her passion towards creating passionate users.

I have managed products which had user base of millions and I know what passion means to handle such products as the creator and what does it mean to your users who have passion towards your users. It was my after-discovery, at the time of creating the product I was just thinking about the usefulness and not the users and even that worked for my users. It changed my approach and I started thinking product management in terms of users, user benefits, personal benefits and the social benefit.

It made me realize that I am not the owner of these properties, they are and that has only happened because we were offering something which was so wonderful that users become passionate about it. In the cut-throat competitive scenario you can only lead, if you have the passionate users backing you up. But this drive has to come within and should be culture not a profit driven initiative. Don’t think dollars, think customers, think humans.

Here is the video of Kathy Sierra found n Tim O’Reilly’s blog. Tim had interviewed Kathy at TOC (Tools of Change for Publishing) conference. Please follow Tim’s blog for the fully story and update.

Alex Moskalyuk points to this iCrossing study – how america searches for health and wellness. Almost 41% of online users used the Web to self-diagnose or self-treat a condition. I feel it’s mainly due to the rising health care costs and lack of guidance and support from the health care professionals. The most important attribute for any health care professional is to offer consultancy, how often do you get that advice from the doctor. Most of the expertise is focussed around treating and curing and not towards preventive health care. Preventive health care is becoming a luxurious ‘spa’ like industry or sweat it out ‘gymming’ industry, with 1000s of newbies posing as the ‘health experts’. Where is the preventive or the most common health knowledge in the public domain ?. Most importantly, where is the ‘care’ in the health care ‘industry’. I have parents with diabetes and BP and had to change 3 doctors and finally get to the 4th one who offered not just medicines but advice and consultation too.

Problem with health information available online: How many users can really make out that the page they are on is researched or a professional material like a journal or something like MensHealth. There are thousands of content posers in this domain who have a ‘professional looking’ blog or a product page and directing you towards the ads of dubious companies. This trend is not good for people, if they start following the advices or products that they get online. The problem is not finding the information, its about the right information from a right source – the information that you can trust.

Photo Credit: Stephen

Ian Harvey writes an apt article on mobile web a case of delayed gratification

Most users see the mobile Web as a novelty, and not a necessity. They face frustratingly slow load times and expensive data charges when they navigate to feature-rich pages that, by comparison, pop up in an instant on their PCs. To complicate things further, users have their choice of hundreds of different mobile devices, two major operating systems, 40 different browsers and four mobile Web platforms.

Standardization: This is the most difficult of all, different browsers, different mobile OSs and different screen sizes. The biggest problem is different handset resolutions and expectations. If your handset supports ‘web’ it doesn’t mean it would look good too. My best experience on net has been so far on my HTC touch phone with Windows Mobile 6. The handset makers have to market their handsets appropriately, common mobile cannot be a replacement for a computer

Connection / Mobile operators as the gateways: In Indian markets, the mobile operators are just pushing ring tunes and other not so serious VAS stuff. And they also think that they can provide content on their own. They would have a better business if they focus of becoming a gateway to the mobile web world and partner with web content providers. By this, the web content providers won’t have the problem of competing with Mobile operators and would have a incentive to provide much better experience to the mobile web users, as they would have a better traffic.

Tony Patton writes a nice article on Builder.au on testing web applications on multiple browsers. He points to tools and resources who will make your life easy in the testing of your web applications for old / new browsers and for mobile.

Ruhani Robin has a some nice tips too

UK is thinking about the proposal to ban the users who download the illegal stuff from the net and this will be done through the ISPs. It will be a legistlation that ISP have to block the users making the illegal download. This is not only a privacy violation but also would be a big headache for the ISP and the general public. What if your 10 year old down downloads a illegal game or what is some technically challenged employ of yours downloads a illegal software utility from the web. If the blocking happens to these kind of incidents then the whole office / home at a loss.

Ben Macklin and Karin von Abrams, Senior Analysts on Emarketer throw up some interesting data on Europe’s 350 million Internet users.:

Europe is a diverse region comprising 48 countries, 27 of which are in the European Union. The region contains some of the world’s Internet usage leaders, such as the Netherlands and Scandinavia, where penetration is around 80% of the population.

In contrast, countries such as Greece, Russia, Poland and Italy lag well behind the European average. But most of these nations are enjoying a surge of Internet growth. Within five years, only Russia will have less than half of its population online.

In terms of sheer size, Germany is the largest Internet market in Europe, followed by Russia and the UK, according to eMarketer’s recent estimates.

Slashdot points to recent study that 6% of Web users generate 50% of the click-throughs. This study was conducted by Starcom, Tacoda and comScore. This requires change in how we look at advertising :

“While the click can continue to be a relevant metric for direct response advertising campaigns, this study demonstrates that click performance is the wrong measure for the effectiveness of brand-building campaigns,” said Erin Hunter, executive vice president at comScore. “For many campaigns, the branding effect of the ads is what’s really important and generating clicks is more of an ancillary benefit. Ultimately, judging a campaign’s effectiveness by clicks can be detrimental because it overlooks the importance of branding while simultaneously drawing conclusions from a sub-set of people who may not be representative of the target audience.”

Before coming to any conclusions, I would wait to know where were these clicks measured – search engines, social networks, portals, community sites…. The user behaviour and returns from the ads would vary across these sites and would it be wise to generalize the outcomes ?

Questions ?

• Where do consumers spend time, how you can build context on sites with high engagement but less ad context (social networks), would you want presence or conversions there ?
• Where consumers are seeking information (news, nice content, bookmarks), since there engagement is low, do you want to have impressions there or the clicks which are very very relevant to the page where user is directly landing in ?
• On any high trafficked home page of any web property, which is more wiser, impressions or clicks ?