In late January, Apple finally announced their tablet device that they had been rumoured to be developing for years. Steve Jobs, in his presentation at the announcement, said that Apple was targeting the market between the smartphone and the laptop, and their answer was the iPad.

Immediately prior to announcing the name of the device, Jobs said that in order to justify its existence, a device in the middle ground between laptop and smart phone had to be better at tasks than both. He said, “Netbooks aren’t better at anything.” The problem is that they are, but we’ll get to that later.

What is a computer?

Laptops – including, at least for the moment, MacBooks – are computers. Many smart phones such as Windows Mobile and Android are computers as well. Any user can write and install software on a computer, without having to wait for approval or authorization by a third party. Multiple applications can be running simultaneously on modern computers, allowing tasks to be performed in the background while not requiring the user’s attention. A computer is customizable through unregulated software modifications.

What is an appliance?

We’ve used the term appliance to describe toasters, coffee makers and refrigerators. Other appliances include your cable box, Xbox, GPS, iPod and camera. While some of these appliances support apps that increase the functionality, these apps are generally regulated and only available through special channels such as an app store. Appliances can run one application at a time, as anyone who has ever tried to play two games at once on an Xbox knows.

What is the iPad?

The iPad is unquestionably an appliance. Like the iPod Touch and iPhone, a user can’t write and install software on it without going through special channels. It’s locked down and restricted, just like your cable box.

iPad’s place

The iPad isn’t a computer, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have a place. Jobs is right that the device will be great for web browsing and reading email. It’ll be stellar for reading books and news. The biggest problem with laptops and modern computer monitors is the aspect ratio – news is much easer to consume when it’s in portrait mode, but monitors on laptops are nearly always wider than they are tall. The iPad will be able to view content in portrait mode, creating the perfect reading experience. The iPad will be an excellent content consumption device, crushing the Amazon Kindle in nearly way.

Apple has maintained its stance regarding Flash and Java, ensuring that the stability and privacy aspects of this device are maintained by preventing these two technologies from trashing the browsing experience like they do on computers. In fact, the lack of Flash and Java on the iPad will hopefully push acceptance of web standards to the point where these pernicious technologies fade away.

As a media and gaming device, the iPad looks beautiful. Viewing pictures, movies and videos will be a great experience. Lacking a camera, card reader and USB ports, viewing is about all it will be good at – without the additional, awkward USB adapters.

Where the iPad will fall short is in content creation. Jobs described the keyboard as a “dream to type on” just before he hunted and pecked for a few letters in his one-sentence email sent during his demonstration. Writing thousand-word blog posts will most likely be arduously possible but undesirable on a capacitive keyboard, aligned at 180 degrees with the screen. The optional keyboard dock is a head-fake towards solving this problem, but as anyone who has ever used a keyboard with a touch-screen device knows, a keyboard without a mouse is a very frustrating and unergonomic experience.

This content creation role is where netbooks excel. Laptops aren’t very portable. Netbooks nearly fit in your coat. The physical keyboards on netbooks are very usable – indeed our 10″ EeePC sports a keyboard that is so big it’s almost a downgrade from the smaller keyboard we loved on the 9″ Eee. Netbooks are computers and can run multiple, custom software applications simultaneously.

The iPad is going to be a great appliance. It’s going to be a Kindle killer. It’ll work great for browsing auction inventory and for Internet bidding – so long as the bidding provider doesn’t rely on Flash or Java. It’s truly a living room device, and we’re going to be making space on our coffee table for an iPad – right next to the netbook.

We mentioned subdomains in our recent series about branding. We’ve discussed DNS before, but we’ve never looked directly at subdomains and how they can help us as auctioneers create a better experience for our users. The first part of this post, like any good figure-skating routine, has a technical component, but stick with us because there is cake waiting at the end.

URI

A Uniform Resource Identifier, or URI, is a string of characters that can be used to identify a name or resource on the Internet. Sometimes used interchangeably with URI, a Uniform Resource Locator, or URL, is a subset of URI and is used to describe where a resource is located and how to get it.

URL parsing

A URL consists of several components. We’ll use the following example.

http://www.auctioneertech.com/auction-podcast

The first part that you see is the scheme, or protocol. http tells us that we’re going after an insecure web page. Other schemes include https, ftp. This is the part of the URI that tells our browser how to get the resource.

Everything in the URL that’s after the first foreslash tells our browser the resource to request from the server. In this case, it’s going to look for the /auction-podcast page.

The remaining  part in the middle, between the two consecutive foreslashes and the first single foreslash, is the domain name. This consists of several parts. Our browsers actually parse these domain names in reverse, looking first at the right-most part, then moving left. We’ll work from right to left in our explanation.

The right-most part, as you’ll remember from the last episode of the Auction Podcast, is the top level domain. In our case, it’s .com. It could be .net, .org, .us, .info, or one of many other TLDs. Establishing the TLD tells our browser the kind of domain it’s looking for. Once it knows that it’s looking for .com, it doesn’t have to worry about the many other possible domain types.

The second-most-right part in our example is auctioneertech. This is the primary domain name which, when combined with the TLD of .com, is enough for our browser to be able to contact the appropriate name server. Each domain has a name server, which houses all relevant information about a domain name. This information includes the IP addresses of the server, the email records which dictate where mail gets delivered for the domain, as well as information regarding subdomains. This information is stored in the name server in a zone file.

Armed with the information from the zone file, our browser now continues to move left in its parsing of the domain name. Left of the primary domain name auctioneertech, it finds a subdomain called www. The www subdomain has become essentially a default subdomain. Most zone files specify that the www subdomain is an alias of the primary domain, causing them to serve the same content. In our case, www.auctioneertech.com and auctioneertech.com are treated the same by our server. However, they don’t have to be. We’re finally to the fun part. Get ready for cake.

Subdomains

Because subdomains are DNS records, they can point to anything. We could, very easily, tell www.auctioneertech.com to serve one page and have auctioneertech.com serve something completely different. It wouldn’t be advisable since it would likely confuse our readers, but we could do it.

Subdomains are free, and we can define an essentially unlimited number of subdomains. For example, to make it easier for our employee users, we could set mail.auctioneertech.com to point to Google Apps so it would show the Gmail login screen. We could make calendar.auctioneertech.com point directly to our company calendar. We could set dev.auctioneertech.com to point to the computer in our living room that’s running a development server so we had a real domain name to use for testing purposes.

Now that we’ve established that subdomains can point anywhere from Google to our living room, let’s look at some specific examples relative to us as auctioneers.

Blogs

We mentioned in our Internet branding series how your blog needs to be located on your website to be properly branded. Some of us, however, don’t have access to our website – or its managed by a third party. Maybe we want to use a different hosting company or allow other users access to the blog while not giving them access to our primary server. In all of these cases, we can use a subdomain to host a blog on one of the many inexpensive providers, while not affecting your primary web host. You could be up and running in under an hour with a starter plan from Lunarpages for $2.95 per month – including an automated WordPress installation. wordpress.com allows subdomain mapping for under $10 per month, allowing you to make your existing blog on wordpress.com look like it’s located natively on your website.

Internet bidding

Maxanet is a popular Internet bidding service that many auctioneers prefer because of its low cost, ease of configuration and private branding abilities. Because it’s a service, it runs on its own servers. Some auctioneers have implemented it through the use of frames, but we’re seeing more and more implementations with subdomains. Subdomains are much better for branding, as we recently discussed in a podcast.

Media hosting

Web hosts have strengths and weaknesses. While there is certainly a positive aspect to using one web host for all our needs, it’s rare that such a service can be found that will do everything we need for under $30 per month. Some hosts pride themselves on speed and reliability. These hosts often charge more or have limits on storage or bandwidth. Other hosts pride themselves on value and offer unlimited storage and bandwidth, but may not be very fast. Subdomains let us use multiple hosts to get the best of both worlds. You can host your primary domain on a server that runs your scripts or houses your bidding, while using a subdomain to host your media. This approach is especially valuable for auctioneers who need to store thousands of pictures for their auctions. If we were running an Internet bidding site, we’d grab an unlimited storage plan from a company like Lunarpages or Bluehost for under $10 per month and put our pictures there, using a subdomain like img.auctioneertech.com as  the way to access them.

Putting it all together

Here’s a real-world example of using multiple servers for an auction company with the domain aaronauction.com. The most important website rule for an auctioneer is to put the auction calendar on the front page. In our example, we’re selecting Maxanet for our Internet bidding and auction calendar management. We’ll house our primary domain, aaronauction.com, as well as the default subdomain, www.aaronauction.com, on the Maxanet servers. This way, Maxanet houses our auction calendar, auctions and Internet bidding from our primary site so our users don’t have additional clicks.

We love WordPress, and it’s going to handle both our blogs as well as all static pages – it truly is a great content management system. We love (mt). The (mt) grid service offers 100 GB of storage for $20. 100 GB isn’t enough to serve as our media warehouse for our years of images and video, but (mt) is super-reliable and will work great to house our WordPress installation. We’ll point web.aaronauction.com there, since it will house all our web pages that aren’t part of Maxanet. It’s also the place we’ll install our bulk email package, phpList.

We’ll need a place to put our pictures. Maxanet doesn’t support storing a ton of content, and our (mt) account is fast and reliable, but won’t be enough storage for us in the long run. We’ll need an unlimited storage solution, and for this need we’ll select Lunarpages at $4.95 per month. As with any cheap, unlimited storage provider, we’ll keep local backups of everything just in case something happens. Should something happen, we’ll be able to put what we need up to (mt) until we find a different host for our media. We’ll point media.aaronauction.com at our Lunarpages account.

Cake

The cake may be a lie, but we’ve got a very robust three-server website, all correctly branded with aaronauction.com. We’re not beholden to any single company, Google Analytics will track all three servers under the same account and our users will neither notice nor care that they’re actually pulling content from three different locations.

Do you have other tricks or tips to using subdomains? Did we bork some of the details about subdomains or zone files? Are you skeptical that a distributed web host system is better than having only one web host? Are you excited about Portal 2, too? Let us know in the comments.

KS9PM2RJFWY3

Speccy tells you what's under the hood - image via piriform.com/speccy

Frequently, in the act of diagnosing computer problems or deciding which parts to order for upgrades, we find ourselves wanting to know about the hardware components inside a computer. A new program aims to make it easy to know as much as possible about the innards of your machine.

Speccy is a product from Piriform, the makers of CCleaner and Defraggler, and is currently in public beta. Here’s their product description from their website.

What’s in your computer?  If you’re like most of us, you can probably name the processor (Intel or AMD, Celeron or Pentium), maybe how much RAM it has, and maybe how big the hard drive is.

When you go to a computer store and see all the bright shiny PCs laid out next to each other, most will have tags or stickers indicating the:

• Processor brand and model
• Hard drive size and speed
• Amount of memory (RAM)
• Graphics card
• Operating system

Two or three years later, when it comes time to upgrade your computer, that tag or sticker may be long gone. Speccy was designed as a free electronic “what’s inside” sticker for your PC.

We’ve found that, while the basic information is available from Windows Device Manager, Speccy goes above and beyond by providing crucial details that Windows doesn’t. For example, Speccy will provide the clock speed of the memory installed, allowing you to know exactly what kind of memory upgrade to purchase. Speccy gives you the exact model of the motherboard so you can find correct and current hardware drivers.

It’s important to remember that Speccy won’t be able to report on anything that isn’t provided to the operating system by the hardware. For the computers we’ve tested, it provides an exact temperature of the CPU but not the graphics card, since not all graphics cards report their temperature. Also, since the motherboard doesn’t provide the name of the audio chipset to Windows, it can only tell us that the sound card is a “high definition audio device”.

If you want a quick way to tell what’s under the hood without popping the case, or need to know the temperature of your processor, Speccy is a fast and small utility that stays out of your way until you need it.

See the bottom of this post to play this episode directly or subscribe using iTunes or Zune or your favorite podcatcher on the Auction Podcast page.

Hello and welcome to the Auction Podcast from AuctioneerTech. Today is Thursday 18 February 2010. My name is Aaron Traffas and today I’m going to examine branding as it relates to a web presence, looking at the best ways to configure websites, email and blogs. This content originally ran as a three-part series in January on auctioneertech.com and began with part 1, domain names.

The choices you make for your domain name begin begin to build your brand before you think about designing a logo or writing a word of copy. There are some rules to follow when choosing a domain name for your site, and the first is to select a .com top level domain. A top level domain, or TLD, is the last part of the website address. .com, .net, .org were among the first and are still the most common TLDs in the United States. Unlike some other TLDs like .gov and .mil, anyone can register new domain names with .com, .net and .org without restriction. The .com TLD is for companies or commercial endeavors. .org is for non-profit – you guessed it – organizations, while .net is for more personal projects that aren’t as official as .com or .org. There are now many other TLDs, and the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, is planning to begin to allow essentially an unlimited number of new TLDs soon, increasing the number from perhaps 100 current TLDs to possibly thousands.

The problem is that nobody remembers websites that don’t end in .com. Now you’re going to object, reminding us that the new domains offer specialization. “But .pro would be a great choice since I’m a professional!” No it wouldn’t. Professionals choose .com. “But .ca is available and I’m located in California!” Your location doesn’t matter. If you’re in the United States and selecting a business or commercial website, .com is for winners.

The second rule when selecting your website is to own the domain that matches your company name. “We’re a US company and someone already has aaaauction.com,  .us works just as well, right?” No it doesn’t. If someone already has the .com name for your company, you absolutely need to change your business name. That’s how important it is that your domain name exactly matches your company name. If your website is kansasbid.com, make sure that your company name is Kansas Bid and vice versa. If you try to get cute with your domain name, or add hacks like hyphens or underscores, few will remember it.

Rule three is that shorter is better. If your company is named for you, your first and best bet is your last name. In other words, if my auction company is called Aaron Traffas Auctioneers, I would look for traffas.com. It suffers from being difficult to spell, but I’d get around that problem by registering travis.com, traffis.com, trafas.com and so on, having each of the alternate misspellings point to the main account. However, since traffas.com is taken, I’d settle for aarontraffas.com, knowing that it was a little less desirable than traffas.com but not quite a deal breaker.

However, let’s say that I run John Smith Auctioneers. Obviously smith.com is taken. Obviously johnsmith.com is taken. Do I look for johnsmithauctioneers.com? Now I’m getting into the problem of a lengthy domain name. The longer the name, the more difficult it is to predict misspellings, the harder it is to fit on business cards, the harder it is to read on billboards, and – worst of all – the harder it is to get customers to remember the site. They’ll ask themselves if it was it johnsmithauctioneer.com? Was it johnsmithauctions.com? They’ll never think to ask if it was .net or .org or .us or .idiot.

Rule four – own your domain name. This problem is rampant within the auction industry. Many auctioneers are approached from an upselling [read:predatory] website hosting company with a sales pitch that goes something like this. “We’ll host a website for you and even register your domain name so you don’t have to deal with a registrar or mess with any of that techy stuff.” I really like it when they use the word techy, by the way. The company then registers your domain name for themselves and creates your website. Should you ever wish to leave, you can’t simply point your domain name to another provider because you don’t own it, they do.

Find out if you own your domain name. Go to http://www.whois.net/ and enter your website. Sometimes, as in the case with Network Solutions, it will tell you you have to go to the registrar used to register the domain name to see who owns it. Stay with me. This exercise is important. Your website provider can be listed as the technical contact, but you must be listed as the registrant or you don’t own your website.

Rule five is that CamelCase isn’t for websites. This rule isn’t necessarily about selecting your domain, but it’s about how you present it to your users. It will probably generate some opposing comments, but I feel it’s both true and important. Websites are case-insensitive. That means that auctioneertech.com in all lower case is just as valid as AuCtIoN – you get the picture. Why don’t I write my website using CamelCase with the A of auction and the T of tech capitalized since that’s the way it looks in my logo? Because websites should ALWAYS be written exclusively in lowercase. Writing your site using intermittent capital letters may make it seem easier to read, but it also makes you seem a little less – to use the word from our patronizing, predatory salesperson from earlier - techy than the competition. Your customers notice the details, don’t give them the opportunity to think less of you or your company because of something as simple as how you write your domain name.

In summary, your website is the most important marketing component to your business. While many people will come to your site by clicking a link, far more will visit your site because they saw your website in an ad or because they’ve been there before. Make it easy for them not only to remember, but to guess. The first thing we web users do when trying to load a site is to type the company name and add .com. If that doesn’t work, if we’re interested enough we may look it up to see what it was supposed to be, either by referencing the ad or searching in Google. In this case, it’s already a strike against the site and the milk is a little more sour before we’ve even arrived at our destination.

Now that we’ve selected our domain name, let’s look at how we can use our email address to strengthen our brand. An email address has two components; the first part is the user name and the second part is the domain name, which usually matches either your email provider or your website.

The worst mistake you can make to turn customers away is to use something other than your name for the user name. This mistake was the at the top of the list in a recent survey, the link to which is available in the transcript for this podcast at auctioneertech.com. sxygrl47 and ladybug_lover worked great for user names in college, but now it’s time to use first.last or firstlast or just your last name. If you have an address that is checked by more than one person, such as a generic company address, then it’s okay to use something like auction or info as your user name, but don’t use that catch-all address for your official company account unless it is actually checked by more than one person. That’s also not the address you should put on your personal business card.

Outside of the above offense, few other concepts seem more obvious than the importance of having an email address that matches the domain name of your website. Nevertheless, I still see some auctioneers who advertise to their customers a generic, free addresses from email providers such as AOL, Hotmail, MSN, Live, Gmail – or worse, from their Internet service providers such as Cox, SBC Global or Comcast.

Using one of these free providers for a personal email account is okay, though it’s much more fun to spend the 10 bucks and register a domain name for yourself or your family to use for your personal email needs. Using an email address for commercial purposes that doesn’t match your domain name is simply unprofessional.

Your website IS your brand. Why on Earth would there be any benefit in advertising an address that doesn’t include your brand? Reasons I’ve heard cited for using a generic email account for business include the following.

• I’ve always used this address
• I have multiple domain names
• Using Gmail makes me seem cutting-edge and hip
• I don’t know how to set up email for my domain name
• I like the tools offered by this provider
• I want synchronized Outlook but don’t want to host my own Exchange server

None of these reasons justifies letting customers see an email address that doesn’t include your brand. The only reason listed that doesn’t involve lack of configuration or simplicity is the idea that customers somehow perceive Gmail users as advanced. This is true, but only in comparison with other free email providers. We all like to make fun of AOL and Yahoo users, but consumers equally ridicule Gmail users who use Gmail for business. It’s assumed that these users are either too lazy or don’t know how to set up their own, branded email addresses.

The solution is simple. Use a service like Gmail - Google Apps for your Domain is a particularly excellent choice – or use a company that provides hosted Exchange server to allow you to have one powerful interface to check all your email accounts. It’s very simple to configure addresses from one or many domain names to have email delivered to one location. Through the use of rules in Outlook or filters in Gmail, you can easily keep track of all your emails from all of your accounts in one central location. When properly configured, each email you send will appear to come from the appropriate account. The methods to this configuration are outside the scope of this podcast and will depend on your registrar and your web host, but there are many free tutorials available to make your email do what you want it to do for you.

I’ve actually met auctioneers who have removed the website from business cards, relying on different colors to make the domain in the email address stand out, thereby conveying both an email address and a website on one line. This leap of faith that customers will recognize this strategy isn’t for the weak-of-heart, but it’s an innovative idea, nonetheless.

When is it okay to use an email address for business that isn’t matched to your domain name? There are two scenarios.

1. You’re unemployed
2. You don’t have a domain name yet

If the first is true, you’re probably not using it for commercial purposes unless it’s to send, and receive responses from, resumes. In this case, a Gmail account – or, better yet, yourname@yourname.com – will lend the most professional impression to a prospective employer. If the second case is true, press pause, think about what I said in the first part of this episode, and buy a domain name. The first year’s registration costs less than having your logo embroidered on a shirt, and it’s many orders of magnitude more valuable and important.

Your domain is your brand. Your email address is an obvious and easy way to promote your brand and show your customers that you run a professional organization.

Now that I’ve discussed domain names and email addresses as they relate to your brand, let’s take a look at your weblog. The same concepts that apply to your domain names and your email addresses absolutely apply to your blog.

Like email addresses, it’s really easy to get a free blog. Free blog providers include WordPress and Blogger. These free blogs assign a subdomain, which is the part of the domain that comes before the primary domain name, lik e yourauctionblog.wordpress.com. Some, like WordPress, even allow you to assign a custom domain name to your blog. This free blog approach is really great if you’re blogging about your grasshopper collection or you want to keep a diary of your trip to the museum of bad marketing tactics, but if you’re blogging for business, you need to have your blog hosted professionally.

Your blog should be branded. Your domain IS your brand. Your blog needs to exist on your website in order to be properly branded. This rule means that the free sites are out of the question – unless you actually work for WordPress, your blog shouldn’t include wordpress.com in the domain name. Assigning a separate domain name to your blog is certainly better, but it still misses the target of hosting your blog on your primary domain.

But wait! I’ve been singing the praises of WordPress for years, why would I say WordPress is bad? The answer is that wordpress.com is a commercial service that will host your blog. wordpress.org is a site that hosts the WordPress software that you can download for free and install on your own website. By installing the software, you can leverage the power and ease-of-use inherent to the WordPress package while allowing your customers to go to yourwebsite.com/blog or blog.yourwebsite.com. By having a custom WordPress theme created, the user experience can be seamless among your auction calendar, your static pages and your blog.

WordPress isn’t the only blogging software that you can use on your website, but it’s certainly my favorite. Your web host may have different software that can just as easily and quickly be installed and configured to allow you to post your articles and news by simply logging in and typing.

Internet branding is simple. While it may be easier to simply grab a free account from somewhere, it’s by far more professional to have a comprehensive, congruent presence that is consistently branded to provide a seamless user experience.

That’s it for episode 21. Did I miss something? Am I wrong about something? Leaving a comment on auctioneertech.com is much better than replying on Facebook or Twitter to tell me about it. Remember, it’s all about unification of the brand.

You’ve been listening to the Auction Podcast from AuctioneerTech. If you have suggestions, questions or comments, or are interested in being a guest, please let me know by going to www.auctioneertech.com/feedback and leaving a message. You can also post public comments about this or any other episode, as well as find show transcripts, on the Auction Podcast page of auctioneertech.com.

Thank you for listening, now go sell something.

A new site launches today and aims to use the auction method of marketing to allow users to sell news-related video to interested parties. We think it’s an interesting use of competitive bidding, and worth a look. Here’s the release.

January 18th, 2010 – New Orleans, LA – Bideo.com is a revolutionary online media exchange where creators of breaking news video and still images can manually protect and sell their content directly to publications in an auction setting. The Bideo message to creators is simple: stop giving away amazing videos and photos, and start selling them.

A tornado tearing across a field, a plane landing in a river, an amateur dunking on an NBA star, or exclusive shots of celebrities and athletes misbehaving, some pictures and videos are rare gems that are often the direct result of a camera phone being in the right place at the right time.

The increasing amount of valuable content being produced by citizen journalists is garnering interest from major publications, which are now welcoming an opportunity to access, purchase and publish such images. Brittain Stone, Photo Director for US Weekly, sees Bideo as a great resource for publications to obtain newsworthy material. “The Bideo format can be the efficient and trustworthy intermediary between those user creators and the buyer. It will be a way for us to tap into formerly ambivalent and often unattainable sources with ease and immediacy.”

HOW BIDEO WORKS

• The seller uploads an image from a computer or mobile device, adds a description and sets the auction terms. The original file is stored on a secure server while a watermarked copy is created and listed in a live auction.
• Bideo’s notification system automatically alerts relevant publications based on the item’s information. Sellers can also manually send notifications to their own list of potential buyers.
• Buyers assess the image and bid on the exclusive right to publish it. A buy now option is also available.
• The original file is transferred to the winning bidder’s account when the auction ends and payment is made.
• The seller receives 75% (and up to 85%) of the final bid price immediately after the sale is complete, and the seller agrees to honor the exclusive license purchased by the buyer.

Founder and CEO, Pike Barkerding, sees demand for a service like Bideo.com rapidly increasing. “Everyday more and more breaking images are published by citizen journalists who are not properly recognized or compensated for their work,” says Barkerding. “Bideo seeks to empower this growing army of ‘right-place-right-time’ creators by giving them a simple, secure and profitable way to promote their content to interested buyers.”

For buyers, Bideo serves as a central, organized source for newsworthy user-generated content that is otherwise difficult or impossible to obtain. “I think we [Us Weekly] miss a lot of interesting and topical images that aren’t represented by the established agencies and therefore don’t percolate up to us in a timely fashion if at all. On those occasions when these people do approach us, negotiations are skittish and drawn out because the potential sellers aren’t familiar with the ground rules of our particular marketplace,” says Stone.

Why an auction? “Newsworthy images can be difficult to price, especially non-professional, user-created images. Think eBay meets iReport. By posting content in an auction, sellers can let the open market decide the price and get the true market value for their work,” says Barkerding. “The same dynamic also creates a chance for buyers to find great deals on exclusive footage.”

Another benefit of the efficiency offered by Bideo is the ability for buyers and sellers to forego pricey middlemen (agencies), yielding lower cost to buyers, higher commissions to sellers, and greater immediacy throughout. “This also makes it attractive to professional photographers looking to sell a rare exclusive,” says Barkerding. “They can sell it autonomously on Bideo and get a higher return.”

Barkerding sees Bideo as a no-brainer alternative to the popular practice of giving content away for anything less than true market value. “Listing is free, and if you think it’s amazing, odds are someone wants to buy it. You set the price, you control the sale and, if it doesn’t sell, you can still give it away. So, why not try Bideo?”

Last summer, a private beta version of the site was launched in Los Angeles with a specific focus on celebrity content as a test market. During this soft rollout Bideo has been working with several L.A.-based photographers and celebrity publications including Us Weekly, TMZ, People Magazine, Access Hollywood, E! and Star Magazine. Bideo.com will be launched publicly on January 25, 2010 to serve and connect all forms of newsworthy content to publications in media markets throughout the world.

For more information on Bideo, please visit www.bideo.com/invitation.

For media inquiries, contact Matthew Bowes or Skipper Bond at 504-897-0462 or matthew@bondpublicrelations.com and skipper@bondpublicrelations.com.

What do you think about this auction application? Is it a great, new way to expose auctions to the media or does it provide barriers to the news process? Let us know in the comments.

We’re putting the final wraps on the 2010 KAA Convention at the Wichita Airport Hilton.

Past presidents of the Kansas Auctioneers Association

Lynn Langvardt was the winner of the Kansas Livestock Bid-call Contest held in El Dorado on Thursday night. Last year’s livestock champion, Charlie Cummings, won the KAA Bid-call Contest this year at the state fair and was installed Saturday night as the new state champion.

Here’s some video that was streamed live via Ustream using a Motorola Droid. It features current IAC Champion Kevin Borger, KAA Champion Charlie Cummings, and others selling during the fun auction on Friday night.

This week, we’ve examined domain names and email addresses as they relate to your brand. In today’s third installation of our Internet branding series, we’re going to take a look at your weblog. The same concepts that apply to your domain names and your email addresses absolutely apply to your blog.

Like email addresses, it’s really easy to get a free blog. Free blog providers include WordPress and Blogger. These free blogs assign a subdomain (the part of the domain that comes before the primary domain name) like yourauctionblog.wordpress.com. Some, like WordPress, even allow you to assign a custom domain name to your blog. This free blog approach is really great if you’re blogging about your grasshopper collection or you want to keep a diary of your trip to to the museum of bad marketing tactics, but if you’re blogging for business, you need to have your blog hosted professionally.

Your blog should be branded. Your domain IS your brand, so your blog needs to exist on your website in order to be properly branded. This rule means that the free sites are out of the question – unless you actually work for WordPress, your blog shouldn’t include wordpress.com in the domain name. Assigning a separate domain name to your blog is certainly better, but it still misses the target of hosting your blog on your primary domain.

But wait! We’ve been singing the praises of WordPress for years, why would we say that WordPress is bad? The answer is that wordpress.com is a commercial service that will host your blog. wordpress.org is a site that hosts the WordPress software that you can download for free and install on your own website. By installing the software, you can leverage the power and ease-of-use inherent to the WordPress package while allowing your customers to go to yourwebsite.com/blog or blog.yourwebsite.com. By having a custom WordPress theme created, the user experience can be seamless among your auction calendar, your static pages and your blog.

WordPress isn’t the only blogging software that you can use on your website, but it’s certainly our favorite. Your web host may have different software that can be just as easily and quickly installed and configured to allow you to post your articles and news by simply logging in and typing.

Internet branding is simple. While it may be easier to simply grab a free account from somewhere, it’s far more professional to have a comprehensive, congruent presence that is consistently branded to provide a seamless user experience.

Yesterday, we examined some of the factors involved in selecting a domain name for your business. It needs to be a .com, match your company’s name, be short and be marketed in lowercase. Today, in the next installment of our Internet branding series, we’re going to look at your email address.

The worst mistake you can make to turn customers away is to use something other than your name for the username. This mistake was the at the top of the list in a recent survey. sxygrl47@domain.com and ladybug_lover@domain.com worked great for user names in college, but now it’s time to use first.last@domain.com or firstlast@domain.com or just lastname@yourdomain.com. If you have an address that is checked by more than one person, such as a generic company address, then it’s okay to find something generic like auction@domain.com or info@domain.com, but don’t use it for your company account unless it is checked by more than one person. That’s not the address to put on your personal business card.

Outside of the above offense, few other concepts seem more obvious than the importance of having an email address that matches the domain name of your website. Nevertheless, we still see some auctioneers who advertise to their customers a generic, free addresses from email providers such as AOL, Hotmail/MSN/Live, Gmail – or worse, from their Internet service providers such as Cox, SBC Global or Comcast.

Using one of the above-mentioned providers for a personal email account is okay, though it’s much more fun to register a domain name for yourself or your family to use for non-commercial purposes. Using an email address for commercial purposes that doesn’t match your domain name is simply unprofessional.

Your website IS your brand. Why on Earth would there be any benefit in advertising an address that doesn’t include your brand? Reasons we’ve heard cited for using a generic email account for business include the following.

• I’ve always used this address
• I have multiple domain names
• Using Gmail makes me seem cutting-edge and hip
• I don’t know how to set up email for my domain name
• I like the tools offered by this provider
• I want synchronized Outlook but don’t want to host my own Exchange server

None of these reasons justifies letting customers see an email address that doesn’t include your brand. The only reason listed that doesn’t involve lack of configuration or simplicity is the idea that customers somehow perceive Gmail users as advanced. This is true, but only in comparison with other free email providers. We all like to make fun of AOL and Yahoo users, but consumers equally ridicule Gmail users who use Gmail for business. It’s assumed that these users are either too lazy or don’t know how to set up their own, branded email addresses.

The solution is simple. Use a service like Gmail – Google Apps for your Domain is a particularly excellent choice – or a company that provides hosted Exchange server to allow you to have one powerful interface to check all your email accounts. It’s very simple to configure addresses from one or many domain names to have email delivered to one location. Through the use of rules in Outlook or filters in Gmail, you can easily keep track of all your accounts in one central location. When properly configured, each email you send will appear to come from the appropriate account. The methods to this configuration are outside the scope of this article and will depend on your registrar and your web host.

We’ve actually met auctioneers who have removed the website from business cards, relying on different colors to make the domain in the email address stand out, thereby conveying both an email address and a website on one line. This leap of faith that customers will recognize this strategy isn’t for the weak-at-heart, but it’s an innovative idea, nonetheless.

When is it okay to use an email address for business that isn’t matched to your domain name? There are two scenarios.

1. You’re unemployed
2. You don’t have a domain name yet

If the first is true, you’re probably not using it for commercial purposes unless it’s to send and receive responses from resumes. In this case, a Gmail account – or, better yet, yourname@yourname.com – will lend the most professional impression to a prospective employer. If the second is true, stop reading now, read yesterday’s post and then buy a domain name. The first year’s registration costs less than having your logo embroidered on a shirt, and is many orders of magnitude more valuable and important.

Your domain is your brand. Your email address is an obvious and easy way to promote your brand and show your customers that you run a professional organization.

Today we embark on a three-part series regarding Internet branding. Specifically, we’ll discuss how the choices you make for your domain name, your email address and your blog begin to build your brand before you think about designing a logo or writing a word of copy.

There are some rules to follow when choosing a domain name for your site.

Select a .com TLD
A TLD is a top level domain. .com, .net, .org were among the first and are still the most common TLDs in the United States. Unlike other TLDs like .gov and .mil, anyone can register new domain names with these three TLDs without restriction. The .com TLD is for companies or commercial endeavors. .org is for non-profit – you guessed it – organizations, while .net is for more personal projects that aren’t as official as .com or .org. There are now many other TLDs, and the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is planning to begin to allow essentially an unlimited number of new TLDs soon, increasing the number from perhaps 100 current TLDs to possibly thousands.

The problem is that nobody remembers websites that don’t end in .com. Now you’re going to object, reminding us that the new domains offer specialization. “But .pro would be a great choice since I’m a professional!” No it wouldn’t. Professionals choose .com. “But .ca is available and I’m located in California!” Your location doesn’t matter. If you’re in the United States and advertising your commercial website, .com is for winners.

Own the domain that matches your company name
“We’re a US company and someone already has aaaauction.com,  .us works just as well!” No it doesn’t. If someone already has the .com name for your company, you absolutely need to change your business name. That’s how important it is that your domain name matches your company.

If your website is kansasbid.com, make sure that your company name is Kansas Bid and vice versa. If you try to get cute with your domain name, few will remember it.

Shorter is better
If your company is named for you, your first and best bet is your last name. In other words, if our auction company is called Aaron Traffas Auctioneers, we would look for traffas.com. It suffers from being difficult to spell, but we’d get around that problem by registering travis.com, traffis.com, trafas.com and so on, having each of the alternate misspellings point to the main account. However, since traffas.com is taken, we’d settle for aarontraffas.com, knowing that it was a little less desirable than traffas.com but not quite a deal breaker.

However, let’s say that we’re John Smith Auctioneers. Obviously smith.com is taken. Obviously johnsmith.com is taken. Do we look for johnsmithauctioneers.com? Now we’re getting into the problem of a lengthy domain name. The longer the name, the more difficult it is to predict misspellings, the harder it is to fit on business cards, the harder it is to read on billboards, and – worst of all – the harder it is to get customers to remember the site. Was it johnsmithauctioneer.com? Was it johnsmithauctions.com? Notice they never think to ask if it was .net or .org or .us or .idiot.

Own your domain name
This problem is rampant within the auction industry. Many auctioneers are approached from an upselling [read:predatory] website hosting company with a sales pitch that goes something like this. “We’ll host website for you and even register your domain name so you don’t have to deal with a registrar or mess with any of that techy stuff.” We really like it when they use the word techy, by the way. The company then registers your domain name for themselves and creates your website. Should you ever wish to leave, you can’t simply point your domain name to another provider because you don’t own it, they do.

Find out if you own your domain name. Go to http://www.whois.net/ and enter your website. Sometimes, as in the case with Network Solutions, it will tell you you have to go to the registrar used to register the domain name to see who owns it. Stay with us. This exercise is important. Your web host can be listed as the technical contact, but you must be listed as the registrant or you don’t own your website.

CamelCase isn’t for websites
This rule isn’t necessarily about selecting your domain, but it’s about how you present it to your users. It will probably generate some opposing comments, but we feel it’s both true and important. Websites are case-insensitive. That means that auctioneertech.com is just as valid as AuCtIoNeErTeCh.com. Why don’t we write our website using CamelCase like AuctioneerTech.com since that’s the way it looks in our logo? Because websites should ALWAYS be written exclusively in lowercase. Writing your site using intermittent capital letters may make it seem easier to read, but it also makes you seem a little less – to use the word from our patronizing, predatory salesperson from above – techy than the competition. Your customers notice the details, don’t give them the opportunity to think less of you because of something as simple as how you write your domain name.

Priorities
In summary, your website is the most important marketing component to your business. While many people will come to your site by clicking a link, far more will visit your site because they saw your website in an ad or because they’ve been there before. Make it easy for them not only to remember, but to guess. The first thing most everyone does when trying to load a site is to type the company name and add .com. If that doesn’t work, if we’re interested enough we may look up to see what it was supposed to be, either by referencing the ad or searching in Google. In this case, it’s already a strike against the site and the milk is a little more sour before we’ve even arrived at our destination.

The current website and interface for financial institution Capital One suffers from some accessibility issues. While its source code suffers a little from divitis and classitis (using the DIV and CLASS (X)HTML elements excessively for layout purposes), by far the most annoying problem is that the site requires users to enable JavaScript to login to view their accounts. It’s as if accessing your Capital One account gave you a paper cut. It’s annoying, but it may be worth a little blood and a Band-Aid® to turn on JavaScript and see your transactions.

This morning, however, Capital One sent an email to its credit card customers announcing that they were moving from an accessibility paper cut to full-on, get-it-over-with-quick amputation.

Starting January 24, 2010, your online statements will be available in PDF format only. HTML access will be discontinued.

If you don’t already have Adobe Reader(R), which is a PDF file viewer program that can open and interact with your online statements, you can download the latest version for free. Please visit [junk link obscured by HTML tracking gibberish].

Remember, your current statement as well as statements from the previous 18 months are always available for you online. Simply log in to Online Banking and select the Statements tab. If you need to, you can even download and print PDF copies, which are identical to your paper statement. Please visit [junk link obscured by HTML tracking gibberish].

If you have signed up for paperless statements and can’t download Adobe Reader(R), click here to learn how to start receiving paper statements again. Please visit [junk link obscured by HTML tracking gibberish].

Their current system is quickly and easily accessible by anyone who can use JavaScript. This user base includes nearly all browsers and mobile devices. It’s pretty fast and allows users to easily and effectively access transaction history. Capital One is turning it off.

In place of their current, working system, they’re leaving us with a head-fake towards functionality by saying we can still download our transactions in PDF format. While it’s true that PDF is an accepted standard, making it the only way to access our data poses the following problems.

1. Now the users must launch a separate program to view their transactions. This program takes time to launch. Even users with Chrome’s PDF plugin, which renders the PDF in the browser using Google, are removed from the carefully-crafted user experience offered by the website.
2. Screen readers and mobile devices will have a harder time accessing the site, if they can access it at all.
3. Third party sites like Mint may no longer be able to access the information. It’s too soon to tell if Mint will be effected, but such a significant change is bound to affect any automated system that logs in to access transactional data.

To make matters worse, they’re recommending the Adobe Reader(R) software, by far the most bloated and malware-like PDF reader on the market. If the user isn’t careful, simply attempting to download Adobe Reader installs a package called Adobe Download Manager. We’re not making this stuff up. If you have Adobe Reader, check your installed programs list. Did you ever wake up and say, “Gee, I wish I could find a product from Adobe that I could install to make it easier to download other Adobe products.” Bet not. It was installed because you didn’t read carefully when you installed Reader. We call it malware when a product installs something you didn’t know about, and Adobe does it with their Download Manager. Uninstall it, you don’t need it and you never did – Acrobat Reader can be downloaded just fine without allowing extra crap on your system. For more information about the proper use of PDF, view the transcript or listen to the episode from Auction Podcast Episode 5 – PDF.

Now don’t read this article and think that we’re saying that PDF should never be used. PDF is a fine format, and the ability to view transactions as a PDF would have been a nice feature to add to Capital One’s existing offering. Providing customers with the ability to print their statements in a way that is formatted like the statements sent in the mail is a very laudable goal. The problem is that they’re moving exclusively to this new format, at the expense of the usability, accessibility and speed by disabling their existing system.

Imagine if we auctioneers said that the only way to get information about an auction, property, or other item was with PDF. Think of how our users would feel when they could no longer simply read the content in their browsers but instead had to launch a completely separate program and enter a different user experience. Sure, we’ve mentioned this topic here before, but Capital One’s accessibility failure announced today gives us a concrete example of why this entrapment of content is bad for users.

Matthew Schultz is the new MSAA champion auctioneer

Duluth, MN – A Stillwater man is the 2010 Minnesota State Champion Auctioneer. At the 22nd annual auctioneer championship held in Duluth, Matthew Schultz won the competition in which 27 auctioneers competed.

The contest was held last night during the Minnesota State Auctioneers Association Conference and Show. Schultz has been part of the auction profession for almost half of his life. He is a graduate of World Wide College of Auctioneering and prior to this contest won the 2002 Minnesota Rookie Auctioneer Contest. He currently sits on the Young Professional Auctioneers Advisory Committee for the National Auctioneers Association and is actively involved in both the Minnesota and National Auctioneers Association.

Schultz will now have his entry paid into the International Auctioneers Championship to be held in Greensboro, North Carolina this July. Asked to describe how he felt with one word, Schultz said, “Awesome!”

The contestants were judged on presentation, chant/voice, effective auctioneering and an interview conducted on stage. This year’s Reserve Champion was Austin Bachman of Ottertail, Minnesota. Rounding out the top five were Kurt Johnson of White Bear Lake, Theresa Ann Larson from Aitkin and Bryce Hansen of Prairie Farm, Wisconsin.

The MSAA celebrated their 60th anniversary at this year’s conference and show, which concluded Saturday night in Duluth. The association is an organization of licensed auctioneers who work to promote the auction profession. As the new champion, Matthew Schultz will serve as a goodwill ambassador for Minnesota Auctioneers throughout 2010.

Justin Clark shows off his ruggedized, waterproof camera with custom auction functionality and explains what realtimebid.com is and does for auctioneers. This video was recorded in July, 2009, at the 60th International Auctioneers Conference and Show in Overland Park, Kansas.

For those of you who have followed us from the beginning, you’ll recall that the first version of the site included a subscription feature that allowed users to receive short, plain-text email updates each time we posted new articles. Well, somewhere between our initial home at Lunarpages, our subsequent moves to Slicehost and then GoDaddy and now our final home here at (mt), that functionality was misplaced. Now it’s back and available in a sidebar widget as well as on the revamped subscribe page. You won’t get spam and your address won’t be compromised. You’re authorizing us and only us to send you a short, plain-text notification when we post new articles.

The second new, shiny widget you’ll notice below the subscription form is from Skribit. It’s a new service that provides a very fast and anonymous way for anyone to suggest topics for future articles, podcasts or interviews. It’s faster and easier than using the feedback form, and it also makes your suggestions public so that other readers can quickly and easily ditto the suggestion. If you want to see an article – or more articles – about the buyer’s premium, Internet bidding, auction calendars, tech rumors or skepticism, type it in and submit it so we can get on it.

You’re sold. You’ve read something or heard something that tipped you off to the fact that netcasts and virtual meetings don’t have to cost an arm and a leg. You’ve created your Dimdim account and are preparing for your first presentation. What do you need? What should you do?

Login early and install the screencaster plugin
Dimdim has a special browser plugin that’s needed to show your screen. If your presentation involves more than just a slide show, you’d better account for the quick and easy installation of the plugin so you’re not surprised by it during the presentation.

Test your webcam and Flash version
It’s really easy to login to Dimdim and make sure that your webcam is working properly. Create a test presentation with just yourself and be sure that you’re prompted for camera access. If you approve it and can see yourself on your screen, everything is working great. Don’t wait until the day of your presentation to test your hardware, and while you’re at it be sure you’re using the most up-to-date version of Flash. Secunia is a great tool to be sure all your plugins are updated.

Use wired broadband
Dimdim does a good job accounting for limited bandwidth, but if your presentation is important in any way, you need to get serious about it. Find a hard-line broadband connection that is connected by cable or DSL. If you’re in a bind and you’re wanting to show something to your coworkers, then you can probably get away with using your computer’s wireless adapter or even Sprint or Verizon mobile broadband. If, however, it’s important that your presentation doesn’t experience dropouts or, worse, disconnections, then find a real Internet connection.

Get a headset. Really.
While Dimdim can rely on a bridge line, Dimdim is much better when you use the computer audio with one caveat: that you have a headset. If a single person with a microphone in a presentation doesn’t have a headset and is instead relying on the computer speakers and the mic that is built-in to the computer, problems are eminent.  The sound coming out of the speakers is picked up by the microphone and creates an echo for all in attendance. If you don’t have a headset mic, and can’t run to Walmart or Best Buy and get one, you should postpone your presentation until you have one for the sake of everyone.

Get a second computer
Your presentation is most likely going to be a PowerPoint presentation, a screencast, or a combination of the two. In any case, you’re most likely not going to be able to view the chat or your video while you’re presenting. It’s always good to be able to monitor what’s going on, so it’s in your best interests to set up another computer right next to the one from which you’re using to present. It doesn’t take much – borrow a friend’s netbook if you don’t have one – but it’s quite worth the piece of mind to have a monitor so you can see your presentation through the eyes of the audience.

Get Firefox on Windows
You have a Mac. You’re cool. Now use it as your second computer from which you can monitor your presentation that you’re giving from Firefox on Windows. Dimdim is awesome in that it’s cross-platform and works on many different environments, but a public presentation is no time to risk things going wrong simply to demonstrate that you paid more for your computer than everyone watching. Linux users, this rule goes for you, too. Grab a Windows computer and launch Firefox to give your presentation.

Best practices
Any presentation should be a two-way communication. Dimdim’s chat tool is a very obvious way to watch the reaction from the audience. Having a speakerphone connected to Dimdim’s bridge line is another way to be sure the audience can ask a question or make a comment about what you’re doing. Be sure, of course, that the phone isn’t loud enough to be picked up by the microphone on your headset.

Dimdim is a fantastically simple and reliable product, but it’s pretty easy to overlook any of the points listed above and end up with problems ranging from minutes lost doing troubleshooting to entire presentations that aren’t viable or aren’t recorded. Good luck.

The new Global Auction Guide

Popular Internet auction calendar Global Auction Guide recently soft-launched a completely redesigned website. The most exciting feature is the enhanced, personalized auctioneer pages which now include video, blog entries and social media updates.

Global Auction Guide is one of several top-tier players in the Internet auction calendar space. Where Global Auction Guide excels is in the syndication of auction events to its large network of websites as well as third parties. Now, with the visual redesign, aesthetics is another advantage for Global Auction Guide.

We interviewed Global Auction Guide’s President Dwayne Leslie back in March. For more information, check out the Auction Podcast episode 16 or view it yourself at globalauctionguide.com.

Last month, Ohio auctioneer Mike Brandly began writing an auction blog with a strong focus on auction law. It’s one of those rare blogs from an auctioneer that is focused at the industry and not on the auctioneer’s own practice.

Writing nearly every day, Mike’s amassed a solid content base that makes for great reading for anyone interested in the legal aspects of the auction industry. Today’s post deals with the buyer’s premium and does a great job objectively summarizing what it is, how it works and the effects it has on buyers and sellers.

Do you have an auction-industry-related blog? Let us know in the comments We’re aggregating a list of such blogs here in our link list in the right sidebar. Eventually, there will be a section of the resources page that will list auction blogs with their recent entries. In the meantime, we’ve got some reading to do.

This news could be fairly substantial to the auction industry. It seems that Auction Zip has merged with Artfact. Auction Zip is currently crushing it in the auction calendar space, and, depending on how they implement this Auctionzip Live bidding platform, they could be poised to pick up a very large user base of traditional auctioneers looking for a real-time Internet bidding solution.

Here”s the release from the Artfact website.

(Boston, MA) ” Artfact, the world’s leading online live auction marketplace announced today that it closed on $13 million of growth capital financing provided by Boston-based Commonwealth Capital Ventures and Ascent Venture Partners. Simultaneously, Artfact merged with Auctionzip, the world’s largest directory of live auction listings. In addition to facilitating the merger, the growth capital funding will be used to expand product development, marketing, and sales efforts.

Artfact and Auctionzip provide over 16,000 estate auctioneers of all sizes worldwide with a complete range of technology and marketing services including online live bidding, and integrated auction management software. Through their websites Auctionzip.com, Artfact.com, and Invaluable.com, the companies allow 2 million art, antiques, and collectible dealers and collectors unprecedented access to search over 160,000 estate auctions each year with a combined value of over $25 billion.

Adam Kirsch, Chairman and CEO of Artfact said, “The investment by Commonwealth and Ascent marks an important milestone for Artfact, and punctuates an exciting first year of growth in Arfact Live and Invaluable Live, our live auctions marketplaces for estate auctioneers. We are eager to have the support of two distinguished partners as we look forward to the launch of Auctionzip Live, and the SaaS version of our RFC auction management software in 2010.”

“Artfact and Auctionzip are the clear leaders in auction listings, live auction technology, auction management software, and auction data. We are excited to invest with Adam Kirsch and his team as they create the dominant global live auctions marketplace complete with the first true SaaS version of auction management software, commented Jeffrey Hurst, General Partner and Co-Founder of Commonwealth Capital Ventures.

Geoff Oblak, General Partner of Ascent Venture Capital, added, “Artfact’s merger with Auctionzip immediately strengthens the position of both companies within the live auctions market. Auctionzip’s unparalleled position with over 15,000 auctioneers in the U.S. is a terrific complement to Artfact’s position as the premium provider of online technology and marketing solutions to the top 1,000 international auction houses.”

It”ll be interesting to see how much of a “merger” this deal is. It sounds like more of a strategic alliance, since both companies are maintaining their own brands and websites. Time will tell, and we look forward to seeing what becomes of both entities.

AuctioneerTech - Auction Podcast

You’re listening to the AuctioneerTech Auction Podcast. Today is Friday, 11 December, 2009. auctioneertech.com – technology, auction and auctioneers, auction tech for the auction industry.

Hello and welcome to the 20th episode of the Auction Podcast from AuctioneerTech. My name is Aaron Traffas and today we’re going to talk about the trends and shifts in buyer behavior that find consumers looking for items instead of auctions and what we auctioneers should do about it.

It used to be easy. Bidders used to check the auctions section in the newspaper for something to do on the weekends. We used to put an ad in the classifieds that listed the type of auction we were holding, trusting that the customers wanted to come to the auction. If you hold it, they will come.

Not anymore. Now, instead of looking for auctions to provide needed entertainment and activity, consumers are taking every opportunity to find a gap in their busy schedules that might provide much needed rest. Weekends are for chores and sporting events and movies, not traveling somewhere in hopes that there might be an item of interest that may or may not sell to a competing bidder anyway. Regular consignment auctions everywhere are noticing a decline in physical attendance, and with a few exceptions due to asset type or geography, it’s becoming clear that the interest consumers have in spending hours at auctions is waning.

What does this trend mean for the auction industry? Does it mean we should pack up our gavels and Half Mile Hailers and go home? Of course it doesn’t. It means we must recognize this change in consumer buying habits and adapt. There is still value in the secondary market. Consumers are no longer looking for auctions, they’re looking for items and they don’t really care how the items are sold. If we present better information about the items to the prospective bidders, they’ll make the effort to make the purchase.

An auction event is a collection of auction items. We auctioneers realize this marketing tactic, and it’s what sets us apart from other one-off competitive bidding sites like eBay. It allows us to more effectively advertise and use economics of scale to keep our costs down and to  do a better job for our sellers. What we need to understand and respect is that we must be more granular in our advertising and extend past the event and down to the item level.

The Internet is the obvious answer as a mechanism to list the items at our auctions. Since traditional media is becoming more expensive and less effective every day, our efforts should be focused towards driving customers from our traditional advertisements to our websites. Only there do we have the ability to convey the amount of information at essentially no cost to our clients.

What kind of information should we present and how should we present it?

Descriptions
The more information we convey, the better we can serve our bidders. Aspects such as year, make, model, style, color and condition are obvious components to a good description. If you list an item and someone asks a question about it, use that question as a tip to add the answer to the description so the next possible bidder won’t have to ask the same question.

Pictures
Digital cameras are cheap, and so is the film. A big memory stick and some freely-available picture processing software makes it amazingly easy to present many pictures of each item.

Sale order
Consumers don’t want to wait. While you don’t have to know the exact minute an item will sell, publishing a sale order on your website will let a bidder know when he’ll need to be at the auction or, in the case of Internet bidding, in front of his computer. Provide a sale order and don’t break from it.

While our websites are the most important places to present all of this information, they are not only places we should post our items. Internet auction calendars such as the National Auctioneers Association’s auction calendar, Global Auction Guide, the National Auction List and AuctionZip provide free or inexpensive venues to list our items. Craigslist, niche forums and bulletin boards are other places that may take a little more work but may generate a significant benefit for our sellers and our bottom lines.

The amount of information we can convey about each item is substantial. The more details we post for each item on our websites and those sites listed above, the more likely consumers are going to be able to find our items through auction- and non-auction search channels. If a consumer looks for an item using Google and we’ve posted that item on multiple websites with a link back to the auction listing on our site, that consumer is more likely to find our item and participate in our auction. If the item isn’t listed in the auction description, the consumer won’t know about it and will make a purchase from somewhere else.

It sounds like a lot of work. We can’t simply string out the items in a windrow on the lawn on the morning of the auction. Picturing, cataloging, data entry and item-level marketing are all important but labor-intensive and expensive components to modern auction preparation.

Buyers are looking for items. Our sellers are looking for buyers. Technology gives us new ways to advertise items to buyers for our sellers. The next generation of successful auctioneers isn’t going to be successful because those auctioneers have the best chant or the longest company histories . They’re going to be successful because they’ve figured out the most efficient workflow to present the most information in the most places about each individual item they’re selling.

That’s it for episode 20. Have a happy holiday season from AuctioneerTech and we’ll see you in 2010 with more episodes, interviews and the continuation of our video podcast series.

You’ve been listening to the Auction Podcast from AuctioneerTech. If you have suggestions, questions or comments, or are interested in being a guest, please let me know by going to www.auctioneertech.com/feedback and leaving a message. You can also post public comments about this or any other episode, as well as find show transcripts, on the Auction Podcast page of auctioneertech.com.

Wednesday’s post showed how a simple extension called Weave can synchronize your Firefox passwords, bookmarks and other preferences between computers. That’s all fine and good, but what happens when you are installing a fresh copy of Firefox and want to install all your favorite add-ons and plugins? Do you write down your list of favorite Firefox plugins from your old computer and install each manually on the new machine?

Last June, Mozilla launched Add-on Collections. A collection is simply a grouping of Firefox extensions that can be batch-installed. You can create your own collection or you can subscribe to a collection created by someone else. This feature makes it really easy to share your collection or quickly update your Firefox to match all the extensions advocated by someone else.

Today, in the final part of our three-part series Fixing Firefox, we’re announcing the AuctioneerTech Firefox add-on collection. We’ve put together 15 add-ons that we use regularly to make Firefox more secure and more feature rich.

User interface enhancements

• Classic Compact
  Used to reclaim Firefox screen real estate. It’s probably our favorite plugin.
• Locationbar2
  One of the best security features of Internet Explorer 8 is the way it greys-out everything in the URL except for the top level domain. Now you can bring this functionality to Firefox to make it easy to know exactly where you are.
• Tiny Menu
  A plugin also mentioned in our article about making Firefox tiny, Tiny Menu replaces the main menu with a single, nested drop-down to conserve space.
• Speed Dial
  Opera has for a long time had an amazing feature called Speed Dial which displays a grid of thumbnails for your favorite websites. This feature was copied by Chrome and Safari and now you can bring it to Firefox.

Privacy and security enhancements

• NoScript
  The king of privacy and security plugins, NoScript got its own article on AuctioneerTech nearly a year ago.
• Adblock Plus
  If you get annoyed by banner ads, this plugin is for you. It blocks content from popular ad networks and is so effective that it makes some web pages look naked.
• Flash Block
  While we can’t imagine anyone hating Adobe Flash with as much evangelical, foaming-at-the-mouth fervor as we do, we hope we’re not alone. Now you can have all Flash elements blocked and replaced by a simple graphic that, when you click it, enables the Flash element. Now you don’t have to worry about unexpected audio or video playing or, worse, Flash cookies that don’t get deleted when you clear your browsing history in your browser.
• Permit Cookies
  A very simple application that overrides the cookie storage mechanism in Firefox. To use, tell Firefox to delete cookies when you close it. Use this plugin to selectively permit cookies that won’t be deleted.

Make Firefox work better with specific sites

• Better Gmail
  Gmail is great, but Better Gmail makes using it on the web better.
• Better Greader
  Google Reader is an amazing program, but using Better Greader is the only way we’ve found to completely eliminate the buttons and navigation to make the content truly full screen. Select options from the add-on menu. You want the minimalistic skin, which lets you toggle the Google navigation header using the W key on your keyboard.

Miscellaneous

• Weave Sync
  Where have we heard about Weave before?
• Screengrab
  Taking pictures of web pages just got easier. Save the whole page or a selection that you make by drawing a box with your mouse.

Web development

• Firebug
  Firebug is the most-used and most-loved web development plugin. It allows you to interact with the code behind the web page you’re viewing. If you’re curious about how a website works, Firebug will let you hover your mouse over each element and it will automatically highlight the code that generates the element. If you do any web development whatsoever, Firebug makes you use Firefox instead of alternative browsers for your testing.
• Firecookie
  Firecookie requires Firebug and lets you see exactly what cookies your browser has accepted. It also lets you modify the cookies in real-time so you can test the security of your site and that of other sites.
• Yslow
  Another plugin that requires Firebug, Yslow is actually a Yahoo! product that analyzes the way that your page loads and offers suggestions to reduce load time to make your site faster and less server-intensive.

We hope you find the collection useful. If you like it, be sure to give it a positive review. Get the collection and rate it from here.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/collection/auctioneertech

Are we missing something? Do you know of a plugin that does a better job than one of those included in the collection? Let us know in the comments.

Anyone who uses multiple computers has the struggle of maintaining productivity across different environments. Web browsers store passwords and bookmarks and preferences on each computer. Wouldn’t it be nice if there were a way to have each computer automatically synchronize your bookmarks and passwords?

Image from mozillalabs.com/weave

If your browser of choice is Firefox, you’re in luck. A product from Mozilla Labs called Weave is currently in the final round of betas for it’s maiden version 1 release.

Here’s the official description from the Weave site.

As the Web continues to evolve and more of our lives move online, we believe that Web browsers like Firefox can and should do more to broker rich experiences while increasing user control over their data and personal information. Weave is a Firefox add-on that is aimed at exploring this opportunity.

Weave is a plugin you install on Firefox on each computer you use. Weave then uses a very secure method of synchronizing your encrypted passwords, bookmarks, tabs, history, preferences, add-ons and personas to the Weave server. These types of synchronized data give it a leg up on the other player in this space, Xmarks (formerly Foxmarks), which only synchronizes passwords and bookmarks. Xmarks also has a social element, tracking your history and suggesting sites. Weave simply ensures that your experience is the same as you move from computer to computer.

Weave supports Fennec, the version of Firefox for mobile devices. We’re looking forward to the release of Fennec for Android so the experience is the same among our computers and our devices.

We’ve been using Weave since it was initially announced as version 0.1. For a while they weren’t accepting new registrations. It’s been very fast and easy to use, and now that it’s in beta Weave is accepting new users.

Here’s how to get it. Select Tools > Add-ons and search for Weave in the add-on search. When you install the plugin and restart Firefox, you’ll be presented with a box to create a new Weave account. Enter your preferred user name and password. You’ll then need to enter an encryption key that is in addition to your password. This key ensures that your data can’t be accessed by anyone other than you – including the folks at Mozilla. It’s quick and painless and you’ll be up and running in no time.

Are you still using Xmarks? Will you switch to Weave? Why or why not? Let us know in the comments.

Mozilla Firefox is an open-source web browser that is popular for its security, third-party add-ons called extensions, and it’s speed relative to the current dominant browser Internet Explorer. Today we embark on a three-part series about making Mozilla Firefox usable.

Stock Firefox uses too much space at the top

Our biggest beef with web browsers today is the amount of space used by the browser. For every pixel the browser uses for title bar, menus and other components, one fewer pixel can be used for the browser’s primary function of displaying web pages. This need for thin browsers is especially apparent on netbooks, where vertical pixels are at a premium. As shown above, a stock installation of Firefox uses a ton of unnecessary space from the top of the title bar to the start of the web page. Fortunately, Firefox can be made to take up the least real estate of any browser, and all it takes is a few simple steps.

1. Rearrange the buttons
2. Turn off the Navigation and Bookmarks toolbars
3. Turn of unnecessary tabs
4. Install Classic Compact extension

1. Rearrange the buttons
Let’s begin. Step one is to rearrange the buttons. As you can see in our starting screenshot, there is a bunch of extra space in the menu bar – space enough to include the complete contents of the navigation bar, especially when you consider that most of us use Firefox on wide monitors. To make the change, click View > Toolbars > Customize. Once the customize dialog box is open, you can simply drag and drop the buttons and the address and search boxes from one location to another.

2. Turn off the Navigation and Bookmarks toolbars
Once everything is moved out of the Navigation toolbar, you can turn it off. We like to turn off the bookmarks bar as well, as we’d much rather have the extra space than the training wheels that are browser bookmarks. If you like the bookmarks, you might consider installing the Tiny Menu add-on which replaces the menu items with a single drop-down menu, allowing you the space to merge your bookmarks to the menu bar just like the navigational elements.

Here is a screencast showing steps 1 and 2 in action.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Turn off unnecessary tabs in Firefox

3. Turn off unnecessary tabs
Older versions of Firefox didn’t show the tabs bar unless there were more than one tab open. Recent releases of the browser now show the bar, even if you’re only using one tab. This annoyance is easy to fix. Click Tools > Options and then select the Tabs section. Uncheck “Always show the tab bar” as shown here.

4. Install Classic Compact
The last part of the screencast shows the checking of the ‘Use Small Icons’ box, but for our tastes that option doesn’t go far enough. Fortunately there is a third-party add-on called Classic Compact that does a great job of making the buttons use enough space to be useful and no more. Installation is very simple. Click Tools > Add-ons and search for “Classic Compact” in the Add-ons search box that comes up. Once you install it, you’ll be prompted to restart Firefox.

After completing these four steps, you’re leave with a very lean browser that properly devotes as much space as possible to the content you’re viewing. Here’s our finished product.

Have you figured out how to optimize other browsers? Let us know in the comments.

Sometimes there is a piece of software that is so obvious for a specific need that we make assumptions. We assume that everyone uses it and, if not, that those who don’t at least know about it and for some unreasoned purpose decide to use something lesser. A few products fit this description, but in our minds none more so than Google Picasa.

Picasa manages your photo collection. It sounds like a simple description of a simple task, but if you’re using anything less than Picasa you have no idea what this description means. We’ll touch on some highlights here, and finish up with both Google’s official video and the reason you may want to be cautious about using Picasa if you’re an auctioneer looking for ways to manage pictures for your inventory.

To start with, Picasa is very focused specifically on photos. It doesn’t work well with graphics or clip art; it does neither vector nor pixel-level bitmap edits like Illustrator or Photoshop, respectively. If you took a picture with a camera, that picture belongs in Picasa.

Picasa isn’t really content working with individual directories of images on the fly. Like iTunes, Picasa wants the entire workflow occur within the program, which you load first before you access and interact with your content. Unlike iTunes, Picasa is somewhat less pernicious and bloated in the way it handles controlling your tasks.

Picasa assumes that you’re going to plug in your camera and use Picasa to transfer the images from your camera to a location selected by Picasa. Picasa pulls the meta data from the pictures – information such as date taken – and sorts the pictures accordingly. Just in case you somehow (gasp!) get pictures on your computer through a means other than Picasa, the folder manager constantly watches the places on your computer most likely to receive new pictures so these additions can be quickly added to Picasa’s collection.

Once Picasa has your photos, you’re able to do just about anything you can imagine. Image adjustments and enhancements from brightness and contrast to red-eye to cropping are all a simple click away. Uploading images to Google’s Blogger service or Google’s Picasa Web is a one-click task, allowing you to easily and immediately share your pictures with the world. The option to order physical prints of your pictures generates an option list that reads like a who’s who of picture printing vendors.

Picasa's facial recognition in action

By far and away the most impressive feature of the latest release of Google Picasa, version 3.5, is the facial recognition. Picasa 3.0 was advertised to have face recognition, but we honestly never figured out how to use it. Not so with Picasa 3.5. The top of the left navigation pane now features a people section. In this section, Picasa automatically close-crops the faces from all your photos and groups them together for you to name. Once Picasa connects to your Google account, your Google Contacts synchronize with Picasa to make associating contacts with the face groups as easy as selecting from a drop-down menu. Once you’ve associated a face with a name, future pictures indexed by Picasa with that person will generate a match suggestion, shown in the graphic on the right as the question mark in the orange circle, which you can confirm or deny. Picasa learns and adapts to increase the accuracy of future groupings.

Picasa’s face recognition will own you. Easily more addicting than the most captivating of games, we lost an entire weekend to tagging our catalog and making sure each face was correctly identified. It’s now trivial to locate every picture in our collection containing a specific person.

Picasa is an amazing photo management tool that makes simple editing lightning fast. Fast picture editing is an auctioneer’s dream, but there is one slight road bump that takes some getting used to. We mentioned above how Picasa wants to manage your collection. As auctioneers, we want to take a folder of pictures for an event and process everything in that folder. While we always continue to store images for posterity, once the auction is over we don’t necessarily need to be bothered by those old images, so maintaining them in our collection isn’t really ideal. Picasa needs to index a directory before it will allow you to perform actions on it, and even when you select a specific image and ask to edit in Picasa, it may take a while before Picasa gets around to indexing that directory.

Equally difficult to understand is the way Picasa exports content. Unlike most other batch-processing image manipulation programs like Arles Image Web Page Creator or Irfanview, Picasa doesn’t allow you to set a relative export directory. That limitation means that instead of saying that you want to save all your pictures in a sub-directory of the original folder, Picasa requires that you browse the directory structure to select an export location. This can be a very annoying process with which to become accustomed.

Google Picasa is unquestionably the best tool to manage your personal photo collection. Because it’s free and an all-in-one tool, we believe it to be also much superior for business than the GIMP or Photoshop combined with Arles or Irfanview that most auctioneers currently use, especially once you become accustomed to the workflow changes.

We’ve touched on the highlights. Here’s the video from Google if you’re interested in seeing Picasa in action before giving it a try.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Are you sold on Picasa? Get it for free from picasa.google.com. Are you scared of the face recognition features? Are you confused or frustrated by the imposed workflow changes? Are you a fan of a lesser photo management system like iPhoto or Windows Live Photo Gallery? Let us know in the comments.

The Motorola Droid officially dropped yesterday. It’s the first of several Android-powered devices coming to the Verizon network. Here’s a quick list of relevant phone features.

• 3.7″ capacitive touchscreen, 480×854 resolution
• 5 mega-pixel camera with flash, zoom and focus
• 16 GB storage card, 256 MB of system RAM
• Horizontal slider with on-screen and physical keyboards
• Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS, e-compass

Apple iPhone, Motorola Droid, Palm Pre

The Motorola Droid is less a phone with smart capabilities and more of a computer with phone capabilities. I’ve had my Droid for just over 24 hours, and this review will primarily compare the Droid with the Apple iPhone and Palm Pre. I’ve been using the Pre since June, and while I don’t have an iPhone, I do use an iPod Touch and am familiar with the app store and interface. I’m staying away from comparisons with Windows Mobile and BlackBerry, in my mind the current fourth- and fifth-place smart phone platforms, respectively. I believe neither platform is anywhere close to as powerful, usable, professional or advanced as Apple’s iPhone, Palm’s WebOS or Google’s Android.

Appearance
This phone is beautiful. The iPhone and Palm Pre each has a resolution of 320×480 pixels. The Droid has a resolution of 480×854. The Droid has as many pixels across as the iPhone has vertically. For those of you doing the math at home, that’s over 2.6 times as many pixels as the iPhone. Indeed, the Droid’s vertical resolution is even greater than most netbooks.

The physical shape is perfect. It’s large enough that it doesn’t feel cramped and yet small enough to not cause you to look like you’re holding a computer to your ear. The edges are crisp and industrial looking, and the body sports a flat black finish.

Phone
This phone is loud. I don’t remember the last non-corded phone that I could hear without complaining or constantly pressing the increase volume button on the off-chance that I bumped the decrease volume button in the two seconds since the last time I hit increase volume. I can’t make a call comfortably with the Droid at full volume. Not only is the experience right for the Droid user, the transmitted volume level is stronger as well. In one of my first calls, the other person told me to be careful not to be too loud when I was speaking. The Droid improves other people’s experiences.

This phone is heavy. It’s not uncomfortably heavy in a way that will make you tired when you’re using it. It’s heavy in the sense that it feels great in your hand and isn’t going to blow away. One of my complaints the Palm Pre is that it’s too small, too light and feels cheaply constructed. The Droid isn’t any of these things.

This phone gets service. It’s on the Verizon network, widely accepted as the carrier with perhaps not the fastest data network, but certainly the widest coverage area. Verizon’s recent purchase of Alltel means that their coverage is superior in the Midwest, especially in rural areas.

Future-proof number portability is assured with complete integration with Google Voice. I’ve covered Google Voice here before, but until now my usage of Google Voice when mobile was limited to using clunky apps that initiated voice calls by having Google Voice call back or by calling Google Voice and navigating the dial prompts. Google Voice on the Droid actually results in a change to the phone’s native dialer so you don’t have to think about using Google Voice before making calls. Now, the only time I’ll have to remember my Verizon number is when I’m dealing with Verizon; the Google Voice number shows on caller ID, not the Verizon number.

Internet and data functions can’t be used at the same time as the phone or SMS functions. It’s not a fault of the Droid or the Android but rather of the current CDMA network itself. The CDMA coverage in the Midwest is so much better than GSM, however, that this limitation is barely worth mentioning.

Mobile office
The Droid is the perfect business device. Must-have features such as Microsoft Exchange/Outlook support and a removable battery mean that this phone can be your connection to your office. I haven’t had the phone long enough to make a comprehensive comment to battery life, but so far it seems to be much better than the Pre’s battery.

Official tethering support is coming in 2010, meaning it can serve Internet to your computer. If you don’t want to wait, and you have a Windows computer, June Fabrics has a version of PdaNet for Android that will tether without hacking.

Apple iPhone, Motorola Droid, Palm Pre

The enormous 5 MP camera has auto focus, zoom and dual-LED flash. There is a dedicated camera button located where a standard point-and-shoot would have the shutter trigger button. This button on the Droid also serves to launch the camera app, so a picture can be taken at any time simply by a long-press on the camera button to load the camera application and then pressing the button to take the picture. The included 16 GB storage card provides a ton of space for these high-resolution images that are so easy to take. The camera supports DVD-quality (720×480) video capture, and a third-party application called Qik allows instant, live streaming video to the web at the press of a button. Another application, called Shopsavvy, allows the camera to scan product bar codes, showing you product offerings based on proximity or price.

Applications are a joke if you can only use one at a time. The Android’s multitasking isn’t quite as intuitive as the Pre’s, with no clear way to understand which apps are running or to quickly switch back and forth between them, but it does allow multitasking and I have yet to be confused or even take any issue with the application switching in Android.

The Droid does turn by turn directions. For free. The news in late October of Google’s free GPS application destroyed the stock of Garmin and Tomtom. The share price of each went down 16% and 21%, respectively, in one day. I think it’s safe to say that the mapping and GPS on the Motorola Droid are more advanced than any other portable device.

I have never found voice recognition useful. Even products such as Dragon Naturally Speaking have came up short for even my most basic of hopes, to say nothing of providing functionality that is beneficial enough to integrate into my work flow. I had the Droid for over 8 hours before I noticed the microphone icon, prominently displayed in the primary search bar on the Android desktop. I touched it and was presented with a prompt that said speak now. I said “directions to Medicine Lodge”. It didn’t load the browser. It loaded the GPS application and automatically began directing me to Medicine Lodge, Kansas. I said “call Diane Poe” and it called my fiancé without even prompting me to confirm my intentions. Other inquiries are converted immediately to Google searches with the results immediately presented. Unlike every other voice recognition program I’ve ever used, the Droid’s voice command actually works in a useful way.

Entertainment
The Droid comes with the Amazon MP3 store, a very mature and robust marketplace for DRM-free albums and songs. The music player is feature-complete, unlike the Palm Pre, and the Google Listen application brings podcast support that simply embarrasses the iPod Touch.

The phone’s speaker is much louder than any other device’s speaker. Listening to music at full volume in a room is almost so loud as to be slightly unnerving.

The Android Market is a mature app store, unlike the store for the Palm Pre. While it may not have as many applications as the Apple app store, we’ve found an app for every function we’ve needed. Loopt, Last.fm and Qik were nowhere to be found on the Palm Pre. They all work flawlessly on the Droid.

Droid vs Pre
Where does the Droid fall short against the Palm Pre? The Droid doesn’t have a mirror. The Droid is a horizontal slider, which isn’t nearly as convenient as the vertical sliding keyboard featured by the Palm Pre. The Palm Pre’s operating system is very intuitive when it comes to multitasking. There isn’t an easy way to zoom out and see previews of the multiple applications that are running in Android at the same time. As I mentioned, it hasn’t been a problem so far since everything in Android is intuitive enough to use without difficulty.

Droid vs iPhone
Where does the Droid fall short against the iPhone? There is no question that Apple has the app store lead, closing in on 100,000 applications while the Android Market houses just over 10,000 apps. The app count isn’t as important, as I mentioned, since there seems to be an Android app for everything I’ve imagined so far. The iPhone does have a robust desktop management application in the form of iTunes, but the days when syncing your device to your computer with a cable was the cool thing to do should be long behind us.

Summary
The Motorola Droid is quite surely the most remarkable device I have ever seen. The physical keyboard, multitasking and high-resolution screen place the Droid squarely ahead of the iPhone, and the quality construction, call quality and Android Market apps are easily enough to best the Palm Pre. All the other features in the article above simply widen the lead against the other competitors.

Back in the days of the FAQ and the image map (remember when you would hover your mouse over a picture and different parts of the graphic would link to different pages?), web designers used a website element known as a sitemap or site index. Modern sitemaps are valuable tools that are submitted to search engines. Sites that still make sitemaps available to the public as navigational elements are behind the times.

When most of us think of a site map, we still think of the link in the footer that takes us to a page that lists all the pages on a site. It used to be the case that sites were so unusable due to browser incompatibilities or lack of developing with web standards that some pages were simply not accessible or not findable by some users without the use of a site map. As such, their use became a trend that in some circles persists to this day.

The problem is that nobody uses them any more. In 2002, a study by useit.com found that 27% of users utilized a site map. That’s a high number, but not when we learn that they were specifically asked to “learn about a site’s structure.” In 2008, the same study found that the number had dropped to 7%.

A user seeing a large list of links isn’t going to have any reference as to the value of those links. Your carefully-designed click-stream, your conversion goals and, most importantly, the user experience are all compromised. Designing using web standards with clear and well-organized navigation that is void of usability land mines such as drop-down menus or Flash navigation will improve accessibility and put the final nail in the coffin of the already-obsolete site map as we know it.

The phrase “as we know it” is important because modern sitemaps are very important for search engine visibility. A sitemap, in the eyes of a search engine, is a carefully crafted XML file that is uploaded or made available on your site. This sitemap has information in it that specifies the page location, the last time the page was modified, how often the page changes and how important the page is. Here’s an example from the official sitemap protocol page at sitemaps.org.

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?>
<urlset xmlns=”http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9″>
<url>
<loc>http://www.example.com/</loc>
<lastmod>2005-01-01</lastmod>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
<priority>0.8</priority>
</url>
</urlset>

As you can see, a modern sitemap is nothing like the old sitemaps from when the web was young.

Sitemaps in Google Webmaster Tools

There are programs that will generate your sitemap for you. They crawl your site and present you with a list of your pages. You then go through these pages and rank them by priority and specify how frequently they change. The program will give you the sitemap file when you can then upload to your favorite search engine. Google’s Webmaster Tools has a Sitemaps section. WordPress and other popular blogging and content management tools have plugins that will automatically generate a sitemap.xml file for your site and submit it to Google. Our AuctioneerTech site map section is shown here.

Don’t let yourself get charged extra for sitemap submission – it’s not an add-on service. Sitemap submission is an integral part of building modern websites and should happen before any website project can be considered complete.

If you’re working with a web developer, make sure he/she is submitting a sitemap.xml file to search engines. Also, don’t forget to make sure that you leave the link list safely in the past where it belongs and off of your public website.

Windows has a very useful tool to monitor the programs and services that are utilizing system resources. In Windows Vista, this tool is the Reliability and Performance Monitor, shown here. In Windows 7, the tool has been upgraded and is called Windows Resource Monitor.

Windows Reliability and Performance Monitor - replaced by Resource Monitor in Windows 7

This tool lists four resources types of system resources – processor, hard drive, network and memory – and allows you to expand the categories to show the programs and services that are currently using each resource. More than that, each program is listed and sortable by related metrics for that category, like average CPU and threads in the CPU category, disk read bytes per minute and response time in the disk category.

It’s really easy to run. Here’s how.

Windows Vista

1. Press the Windows Key + R on the keyboard (faster) or click Start and then click Run to bring up the run dialog box.
2. Type perfmon and press enter or click OK

Windows 7

1. Press the Windows Key + R on the keyboard (faster) or click Start and then click Run to bring up the run dialog box.
2. Type resmon and press enter or click OK

This tool is very valuable when you’re trying to understand what program is making your computer or your network run slowly. It’s much more detailed than Windows Task Manager, which shows a mere fraction of the information available in Resource Monitor or Reliability and Performance Monitor.

Tomorrow marks the release of a new version of Ubuntu Linux, version 9.10 called Karmic Koala. This is your AuctioneerTech guide to what Linux is and why it’s more relevant today than ever before.

Image via Wikipedia

Operating system
An operating system exists between the application or program you’re running and the hardware you’re running it on. Microsoft’s Windows and, to a much lesser extent, Apple’s OS X are the only two other operating systems that lead Linux in market share.

Personal computers all need operating systems. Most modern personal computers can run Windows and Linux. Some personal computers can also run OS X, most of which are made exclusively by Apple. When someone says he got a Mac, he means a personal computer purchased from Apple running OS X. That Mac could also run Windows or Linux, and some PCs are able to install and run OS X.

Open source
We’ve already covered open source with an episode of the Auction Podcast called Open Source Auctioneer, so we’ll simply mention here that Ubuntu is very open source. It strikes a solid balance of being open and yet making it easy for users to install proprietary components like audio and video applications, hardware drivers and other programs.

Distributions
Linux is actually the kernel, or core, of the operating system. A distribution of Linux refers to the desktop environment and applications that are packaged with the Linux kernel. Ubuntu is currently the most popular desktop distribution, but other common varieties are OpenSUSE, Fedora, Debian and Mandriva. The top 100 distributions are listed on distrowatch.com. Each of these distributions can run one of many desktop environments such as GNOME (Ubuntu’s default), KDE and Xfce.

Linux is much more than a personal computer operating system. The Linux kernel can be found in servers, routers, cell phones, GPS – just about anything with a processor can run Linux. Since Linux is open source, it can be built using only the components necessary for the application. This property makes it very small, light and handy for novel applications.

Why Linux
Linux works on more hardware than Windows. Linux is easier to use than Windows or Mac. Software installation is as simple as selecting programs from a list, as opposed to having to download an installer file and running it. There are free programs that accomplish just about any task that are immediately available to any Linux-running computer with an Internet connection.

Linux has a graphics productivity package called Compiz-Fusion. It’s light-years ahead of anything on Mac or Windows. The biggest benefit is the four virtual desktops, but it can do many other exciting transitions and effects. Here’s a short sample showing Compiz-Fusion running on Debian.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Why Ubuntu
Ubuntu is the most popular distribution for many reasons. Most of the reasons Ubuntu is so popular are the same reasons Linux bests Windows and Mac – it’s easier to install the operating system and easier to install software. A new version of Ubuntu is released every six months, as opposed to the release cycle of Microsoft and Apple which is counted in years. Ubuntu has a commercial sponsor in a company called Canonical which makes money by offering paid commercial support and application development for Ubuntu. Ubuntu has a huge community of advocates who fill support forums and write documentation promoting Ubuntu and open software in general. Ubuntu is the most popular because it’s more organized than other versions of Linux, it has solid support and a six-month release cycle.

Image by Szymczak via Flickr

Ubuntu Karmic Koala test on HP TouchSmart tx2
The freshest Ubuntu doesn’t come out until tomorrow, but we popped a fresh hard drive in our 30-day-old HP TouchSmart tx2-1270us and installed the release candidate to test out the new features tonight. The installation was easy. Simply pop in the disc and reboot the computer. It prompts you if you want install or to try Linux without changing your computer – great to boot Linux and try it out before you install it. After answering a few questions about the preferred language and keyboard layouts, we told it to use the whole hard drive and do a full install.

Hardware support
On first boot, the ethernet drivers worked immediately. Once connected, the system prompted to install proprietary drivers for the wireless card and the display adapter. After the reboot, both the onboard display and the external monitor were both working at the correct resolutions. My wireless networking was also working just fine. This method of prompting for permission to install the non-open packages fits Ubuntu’s open source philosophy by not installing un-free software by default, but allowing the user to do so quickly and easily.

New in Karmic Koala
The most notable change in Karmic is the new Software Center. It’s a much simpler and more powerful version of the add/remove programs application from prior versions of Ubuntu. All available programs are categorized and detailed in a much better way. Also new is Ubuntu One, a Dropbox-like service that now comes with Ubuntu by default. It offers 2 GB of cloud storage for free that synchronizes your data between your Ubuntu computers and allows you to easily share your content with other users, regardless of platform.

Like the most recent releases of Windows and OS X, this latest version of Karmic Koala is more of a performance upgrade than a feature release. Karmic boots faster and is more secure. It uses an improved file system, better firewall and makes it easier to develop applications.

The future of Linux
Linux is more relevant now than ever before. If you’re picking an operating system for someone who is unfamiliar with computers, Ubuntu Linux is the clear choice. The only user who might find it difficult to understand is the user who has grown up using only Windows or Mac and is afraid to leave proprietary applications like Microsoft Word and Photoshop behind in favor of open programs like OpenOffice and the GIMP.

Linux is much less expensive, not only for the software itself (it’s free) but for the applications that run on it. Linux is fast on older hardware and thus doesn’t require frequent hardware upgrades. It’s the right choice for business, and it’s the right choice for the desktop.

It has an uphill battle. Microsoft recently dragooned Best Buy employees into spreading anti-Linux propaganda. Most computer users haven’t heard of Linux, and only a small fraction of those who have heard of Linux have actually tried Ubuntu. Of those who have tried it, many give up on it once they learn that they have to learn new programs instead of being able to use their old applications that only ran on Windows or Mac. The increase of Mac market share shows that users can learn to give up their programs, so public perception must be the biggest reason Linux doesn’t have a market share greater than about 1%.

How to try it
If you’re looking into buying a netbook because you need a web browser, email and the ability to edit documents and spreadsheets, you can’t go wrong with buying a Linux netbook. Ubuntu has a special version, called the Ubuntu Netbook Remix, that is specifically built for netbooks. We’ve been running it for six months and have found it to be fast, stable and powerful.

If you just want to see it, give the live CD a shot. Download the iso and burn it to a CD. Reboot your machine with the CD in the drive and select the option to try without making changes to your computer. You’ll boot into Linux and get to try the default applications and browse the Internet. Of course it won’t be as fast as it would be if it were truly installed on your hard drive, but it’s a great way to see what it’s like before replacing Windows or OS X.

The upgrade process for Windows 7 is pretty straightforward – if you’re doing an in-place upgrade from 32 bit Vista to 32 bit Windows 7 or 64 bit Vista to 64 bit Windows 7. It gets tricky when you want to perform an upgrade from 32 bit Vista to 64 bit Windows 7.

You can’t do an in-place upgrade. An in-place upgrade is where Windows 7 is installed while Vista is running. Your programs, documents and settings are preserved.

To migrate from one architecture to another, as in the case of 32 bit to 64 bit, you must perform a clean or custom install. Unfortunately, the upgrade version of Windows 7 must be able to check to see that you are eligible for the upgrade.

We spent a ton of time tonight searching through the Windows documentation. We had just purchased a new hard drive and a Windows 7 64 bit upgrade to install on that hard drive, using the eligibility of an existing 32 bit Vista installation. We tried several times to perform a custom installation, but every time we were asked to enter the product key, Windows reported that the key was invalid.

The secret to getting this type of upgrade to work lies in a free tool provided by Microsoft called Windows Easy Transfer. It’s promoted as the tool to upgrade from Windows XP to Windows 7. It is recommended for a custom install to upgrade from Windows Vista to Windows 7, but we didn’t see anywhere that it was required. We had no interest in moving any files or settings to the new installation, so it wasn’t an obvious tactic.

Using Windows Easy Transfer apparently saves the information from the Vista installation so that Windows 7 recognizes that the upgrade is valid.

Here’s the correct process to perform a clean, custom installation using a Windows 7 upgrade.

1. Download and install Windows Easy Transfer
2. Use Windows Easy Transfer to copy all your settings and files to an external hard drive
3. Reboot your computer from the Windows 7 DVD
4. Select custom install and follow the prompts
5. When you are finally prompted to enter your upgrade product key, Windows will search and find the external hard drive with the files saved by Windows Easy Transfer and approve the upgrade

If you find a place where Microsoft states that Windows Easy Transfer is required to upgrade from Vista 32 bit to Windows 7 64 bit, please let us know in the comments. If you know of another way to perform this type of upgrade without using Windows Easy Transfer, that’d be good to know as well.

On September 28, Microsoft announced the general release of a new product called Microsoft Security Essentials. It’s the successor to OneCare, Microsoft’s prior for-pay security package. Security Essentials has been in limited preview under the codename Morro and now is available to everyone for free.

Security Essentials racked up 1.5 million downloads in first week alone. It’s rare that Microsoft gets a new product so right the first time, but with this one they really did. PC World claims Windows Security Essentials garnered perfect score in their tests, with zero false positives – something most other antivirus programs still fail to achieve.

There are other free anti-virus solutions. None of them, with the exception of ClamWin (an open source anti-virus which is really good but lacks real-time scanning) allow for the use in a commercial application. This catch means that if you use your computer for anything related to your business, you have to purchase a license. If you’re using AVG or Avast on a work computer and you haven’t paid the $50 for a copy, you’re violating the end user license agreement.

Microsoft Security Essentials is fast and light. There’s essentially no performance decrease, absolutely no subscription update nags, no ethical questions about using a home-use product for commercial purposes, and no money spent on anti-virus that slows down your system while not really doing much to protect it in the first place.

Download your copy today. It’s fast, free and runs in Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7.

Social networking is one of many buzzwords that has recently risen to fad proportions. It seems that any time the subject of marketing arises, the topic quickly turns to importance of social networking.

The power of social networking lies in the creation of personal relationships. We’ve mentioned before that you should use social networking to increase the social surface area of you, not that of your company or organization. The quickest way to get us to unfollow or leave your group is if you start trying to promote your business instead of simply relating things about you. Solely to illustrate this point, we created our sister site AuctioneerTweet with the only requirement being that the auctioneer accounts must be operated by the auctioneer and the content must not be exclusively about business.

Social networking is powerful. It’s a powerful business tool not because you directly advertise your business, but because you can increase your personal touch. Social networking is dangerous because of its sensationalism. It’s easy to get caught up in thinking that it’s the be-all and end-all to the next generation of marketing.

Social networking may indeed be an important business tool, but it’s not the only business tool that should be used in marketing. We see many auctioneers investing an enormous amount of time in social networking. Some of these auctioneers have bad websites with one or more of the following.

• clashing or obnoxious colors
• fonts of inappropriate sizes
• fonts of inappropriate colors
• difficult-to-find auction calendars that aren’t on the front page
• inappropriate or unprofessional information
• inappropriate Flash elements

We’re not picking on anyone, but your website is the most important marketing tool you have. Your site is more important than social networking by an order of magnitude. One of the benefits of social networking is that essentially every service allows you to enter your website in your profile. If you’re successful in creating a possible business relationship using social networking and that prospective client clicks the link in your profile to a website that isn’t in order, you’re likely to fail in converting that prospect into a client.

Expanding social networking when you have a poor website is a misuse of your resources. It’s like conducting an auction without having a clerking staff in place. We’re not advocating that you stop using social networking until you get a website or get it fixed, but we are pointing out that it’s important to not get caught up in the hype of social networking and place it above other, more obvious priorities.

Have different thoughts about the importance of social networking? Is it ok to have a bad website? Let us know in the comments.

Unless you don’t pay any attention to the tech press, you’ve been hearing a lot recently about Google Wave. Even if you’re one of the lucky 100,000 with an invite – or one of the eight more users that each of those got to invite to the private beta – you’re probably wondering what Google Wave is. It’s essentially a merging of email, instant messaging and document collaboration – Gmail, Google Talk and Google Docs – all rolled together in a linear interface.

We’ve been playing with it – one of the first 100,00 – for the last week or two and can say it looks quite promising. The service is fairly useless in a kind of lonely way if you don’t have other users with whom to collaborate. Imagine being the only user you know who has email. That’s Wave until they start to allow more users.

We’ll have more information about Wave once it’s more widely available. Until then, we’re not going to say more and add ourselves the list of those who have tried to explain Wave and failed, but here’s the best video we’ve seen on the subject.

Click here to view the embedded video.