the markITeer

Is the Internet outdated?

the markITeer — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 16:07:16 +0000

Two days after the Internet TV platform Joost went public, The Wall Street Journal publishes an article on two of the Internet’s pioneers, calling the technology powering the Internet ‘outdated’. 69 Year old Larry Roberts, project owner of ARPAnet (which was the very first version of the Internet), and Len Bosack, 55 and founder of the networking giant CISCO are both looking for a solution.

“The Internet wasn’t designed for people to watch television. I know because I designed it.” Dixit Mr. Roberts.

It’s a simple fact that much of the building blocks of the present-day Internet are pretty close to retirement indeed. Think for instance email : the protocol used for sending email (the SMTP protocol) still dates from the very early days of the Internet and was never designed to support sending zillions of emails every day. As was it never designed to support authentication … which is the real problem in fighting spam. But also IP addresses are running out, resulting in a difficult roll-out of a new IP address format (known as IPv6) and access lines get clogged by the massive amounts of data resulting in Google hiring a submarine cable negotiator.

And why not -in the process of redesigning- try to lower the energy consumption of the Internet?

Let’s hope mr. Roberts and mr. Bosack can work their magic once again…

Read the full Wall Street Journal article

5 minute guide to HTML for marketeers

the markITeer — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 10:54:28 +0000

Now that marketeers earn more and more control over ‘their’ content using all sorts of content management systems (CMS) going from simple blogs to complicated website maintenance tools, they also get confronted more often with the technical side of things. And although the solution builders are trying their best to shield you from all that using fancy what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) editors, there will be a point where you will have to get your hands dirty and write some basic HTML code in order to make your content look exactly like you had it in mind.

So here it goes… the 5 minute guide to HTML for marketeers.

First things first: What is HTML?
HTML is short for HyperText Markup Language : it’s a language in which you can define the markup of your content on the web. It’s the basic language every page on every website is build upon. To take the test: go select ‘view source’ from your browser’s ‘view’ menu now, and you will see the HTML code of this page.

The nice thing of HTML is that it is human readable! It’s all just plain text! If you scroll down a bit in the source code of this page, you will find that all this text can be found in the code! The difference is however that the code contains more than just the visible text of the webpage: it also contains how this text should be displayed. This is done using tags. A tag tells something about how a piece of text should be rendered on the page. There will always be an opening tag, indicating the beginning of the piece of text, and a closing tag indicating the end of the piece of text, and they look like this : my piece of text, with being the opening tag, and being the closing tag (the ‘/’ character indicates that it’s a closing tag).

Of course, if you would just make up a name for a tag like I just did with the ‘my_tag’ tag, the browser wouldn’t know what it would have to do with it. So there are a whole lot of pre-defined tags to obtain specific layout effects.

some examples :
– The ‘b’ tag puts my text in bold. So if I would like to put some text in bold using HTML, I would have to type following code : this is some text in bold. On your page this would look like this : this is some text in bold
– the ‘i’ tag puts my text in italic, resulting in code like this : this is some text in italic. On your page this would look like this : this is some text in italic

Pretty neat, hey?

So what else is there? Well every HTML page has a specific structure which is defined by…tags, and looks like this:

That is what the code of an empty webpage would look like. The head tag is used to hold some additional information on your web page (for search engines etc.), and the body tag is used to mark the beginning and end of the visible content of the page. And around all of this, there is the html tag.

Interesting in this basic structure is that tags can be nested: you can put tags inside other tags, just like the ‘head’ and ‘body’ tags are between the opening and closing ‘html’ tags. Keep this in mind, we’ll be needing this further on. Also, when you’re editing just a part of a webpage (eg inside a content management system), you don’t need to include these tags, because they always encapsulate the whole page, and never just a part of it.

So go ahead: create your first webpage! Open up Notepad, copy/paste the basic structure from above and add some text between the and tags. Put parts of it in bold and other parts in italic, and save the document as myfirstpage.html (note that every HTML page should have the extention .html or .htm!). Just double-click it and your page will open in your web browser!

Some tags may require a bit of additional information. This is done by adding attributes to the opening tag. Example: the tag for making a text clickable to another page or website is the ‘a’ tag. So by what we learned before, we could make a text clickable by writing something like this: this is a link, right? But to what page will the browser take us after we clicked the link? In our code we didn’t give any information about that. So that’s why we should add this to our tag using the ‘href’ attribute like this: http://www.luon.com”>this is a link. Now, when we click the link, our browser will know it will have to redirect to the http://www.luon.com website (check it out: this is a link). So open up your webpage again in Notepad (or another text editor), and go add some links!

Some tags make an exception on the opening/closing tag rule: If there will never be any text between the opening and closing tags, the two tags are combined into one!
Line breaks for instance: by default, all text will apear without line breaks, even if you put a line break in the code!
So if you put this text into the body of your code:

this is line 1
this is line 2
this is line 3

It will show like this in your browser:

this is line 1this is line 2this is line 3

To avoid this, you have to use the ‘br’ tag to generate a break. But instead of using

, the opening and closing tags have been melted together into
, because there will never be any text between the opening and the closing tags of a break.
So if we put this into our code:

this is line 1

this is line 2

this is line 3

we get the result we were looking for:

this is line 1
this is line 2
this is line 3

Two other commonly used tags having an integrated opening and closing tag are the ‘hr’ tag which generates a horizontal line across your webpage and which is always used like this :

, and the ‘img’ tag for images: eg: http://www.luon.com/images/lo_luon.gif” />

I promised to return to the issue of using tags inside other tags: Suppose you would like to make an image clickable so that if the user clicks on it, he would be directed to your website. How would you do this?
First our image:

http://www.luon.com/images/lo_luon.gif” />

Second : to create a link, we need the ‘a’ tag like in the example above :

http://www.luon.com”>this is a link.

So to link the image instead of the ‘this is a link’ text, we would have to put the ‘a’ tag around the image tag like this:

http://www.luon.com/images/lo_luon.gif” />

That’s all there is to it!

This technique is also used to create tables. Tables can be handy if you would like to present structured data in columns and rows, but also to create for instance a 3 column layout for your webpage as is the case on this website.
You can build tables using three tags:
– the ‘table‘ tag marks the beginning and the end of a table
– the ‘tr‘ (table row) tag marks the beginning and the end of a table row
– the ‘td‘ (table data) tag marks the beginning and the end of a table cell holding data
Unless you use some advanced HTML, all rows should contain an equal number of cells!

an example:

this is cell 1 on row 1 this is cell 2 on row 1

this is cell 1 on row 2 this is cell 2 on row 2

would give you following result:

this is cell 1 on row 1 this is cell 2 on row 1

this is cell 1 on row 2 this is cell 2 on row 2

Now that you basically know how HTML works, all you have to do is get yourself familiar with the most commonly used tags. This is my list of need-to-know HTML tags and attributes for marketeers:

enjoy!

Creating a web mock-up

the markITeer — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 13:15:56 +0000

For many businesses, summer holidays are a period of slightly less stress and slightly more time to spare. Time to for example think about redesigning the old website. Traditionally, one would start with a good brainstorm, unleashing (hopefully) everybody’s wildest fantasies and ideas. But soon after, the difficult task of making these dreams reality will soon pop up and somebody will have to create a first sketch of the website.
This is where web mock-ups come into the picture. A web mock-up is basically a sketch or an early layout of a website. In theory, the difference with a prototype is that a prototype is ment to function, even if not fully so, whereas a mock-up is only ment to look like the finished product. But when speaking about a simple website, the two terms can be used interchangeably.

The aim is to quickly concretize ideas without too much hustle. This way, you can test and get feedback even in the early stage of conception. This feedback can than be incorporated back into the mock-up, until it reaches the point where everybody’s happy and designers and developers can take over to create the real thing.

In practice, a web mock-up will look like a number of boxes representing different elements on you pages such as banners, content blocks, navigation etc. No design, no functionality. The only ‘functionality’ that will be really there is the linking between the different pages so the flow of the website can be tested. As an example, I created a small mock-up for a part of the new EmailGarage website. Check it out here.

In prototyping terms, this way of working is also known as ‘rapid prototyping’ which stands for converting abstract ideas as soon as possible into real, concrete proposals which can be iterativaly enhanced using tester’s feedback. Rings a bell? Yep: this is indeed what you can also find in the web 2.0 ‘Getting Real‘ phylosophy.

So how do we do it? What tools are there to create such mock-ups?

Basically, you could catalogue the tools that are most commonly used for creating web mock-ups into 3 main categories:

1. tools for the real prototyper
2. tools for the designer
3. tools for the webbuilder

Category 2 and 3 require specific skills: in category 2 we can find tools such as Adobe Photoshop or Fireworks, which can be used to create grapically perfect-looking layouts. In category 3 we can find the real web-building tools like Adobe DreamWeaver which can be used to create fully functional and picture-perfect websites. Although both types clearly have their merits in the development process of web sites, they are not appropriate for creating web mock-ups.

Below you can find a comparison table of some commonly used (and abused) tools. I tested them on a number of different criteria:
– support for master pages: can you create e.g. a basic navigation frame that is automatically put on all pages without having to copy it to every page? If not you would have to make a correction to the navigation structure of your mock-up on each and every page, instead of just once on the master page.
– support for links on the master page: a number of tools offer support for master pages, but the links put on the master page are lost when you create the final HTML.
– support for page scrolling: does the tool support pages that are longer than one screen?
– support for page notes: the ability to add notes to a page
– support for element annotations: the ability to add extra information to page elements
– export formats: which formats are supported for exporting your web mock-up.
– support for navigation tree: can you create a navigation tree for your mock-up, or are all pages on the same level?
– users: what category of users does the tool address?
– platform: on what platforms can the tool be installed?
– pricing: what does it cost?

Although rather costly, I very much like Axure RP Pro 4. It’s simple user interface and enhanced functionalities allow you to create really quickly good web mock-ups (see also the example above).

That’s it.
Happy prototyping!

links : Denim, ConceptDraw WebWave, Axure RP Pro 4

Email and/or RSS?

the markITeer — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 14:01:24 +0000

Since a couple of months I’m systematically unsubscribing myself from email newsletters and subscribing to the RSS feed equivalent. I just couldn’t handle the massive amount of newsletters any more. It cluttered my inbox, drowned the important messages. My ideal scenario? Using e-mail for personal messages and RSS for all the rest.

However, being an email marketeer myself since quite some years, I was kind of shocked by my own actions. Could it be that RSS is replacing email after all? Is email marketing dead?

It’s in fact a very old discussion on the net. Back in 2004, at the dawn of RSS, RSS believers where quick to bury email alive, waving the spam-flag to prove their point. Email defenders answered with the email’s ease of use and personalization possibilities. It was an endless yes/no game stuck in the same arguments over and over again. Luckily the discussion faded and RSS and email believers alike came to believe that both technologies can peacefully co-exist and complement each-other in the marketing mix.

It took however till the wide-spread adoption of web 2.0 in 2006 for RSS to become a real mature medium of content delivery. Google launched its online RSS reader, blogs made the number of feeds sky-rocket and widgets offered all new possibilities.

So where are we now? Can RSS and email peacefully co-exist? Or is RSS becoming an email killer after-all?

Starting from the great comparison table between email and RSS Alex Barnett put together back in 2004, I created a new, up-to-date, version showing both mediums’ strengths and weaknesses from a marketeer’s and customer’s point of view, and added some remarks:

Remarks

(1) Email has proven a to be great tool for creating a personalized, 1-to-1 feel in mass communication, going from simple personalized salutation to Amazon-like delivery of personalized content. RSS on the other hand is currently mostly used for non-personalized content delivery. With RSS, you can choose the feeds you want to subscribe too, but that’s as far as it goes. The upside for the consumer is that because content isn’t personalized, and because RSS doesn’t require you to give any personal information to subscribe (as opposed to the email address for email marketing), the consumer can see the content without giving away any sensitive data. As soon as the content has to be personalized, the consumer would have to reveal himself. Strangely enough, this is an option that is almost never considered: You could offer the RSS feed subscriber the option to receive personalized content via RSS if he makes himself known. In that case the subscriber would receive a personal RSS feed URL with personalized content, and would he be able to get the best of both worlds.

(2) The viral effect of email has enormous potential. It is very easy for a recipient to add some comments and forward the email. The viral effect of RSS on the other hand was long time a problem. Web 2.0 did however solve this by embracing RSS as a means of content sharing between different social networks like digg.com or del.icio.us. People can comment on stories they received via RSS, add them to their online bookmarks which in their turn can be shared with other people and so on. Feedburner (Google-owned) is one of the big players in this field. It allows you to easily offer your feeds in RSS format and to have your stories submitted to a number of social networking sites. Interesting is that it also allows you to receive new content via email (e.g. the email subscribe link on the right)!

(3) Email marketeers can rely on a set of tools to track the behavior of the email recipients. Click-through, opened and bounce ratios, opt-ins and opt-outs, ROI, … they can all be measured because the consumer has had to make himself known in order to receive the content: he had to give his email address. And this allows the email sender to track all actions back to you, the recipient. Because with RSS the consumer doesn’t have to give any personal information, statistics are less detailed. Unless of course you could convince the consumer to subscribe to a personalized feed (see (1))…

(4) This is one of the major draw-backs of RSS content gathering. Email is much easier to search and archive. Most RSS readers only allow archiving of entire feeds, and for example Google (how strange sounds this?) doesn’t offer a search functionality to search all your subscriptions in its RSS reader (although there is a workaround available).

(5) This is however changing rapidly.

Conclusion

What was true in 2004 looks to be truer still. RSS and email have become two full-blown communication channels that can (and must) exist next to each other. It’s up to the marketeers to adapt to this reality and figure out how they can integrate both channels in their marketing mix.

Personally, I have a couple of rules I follow when I decide whether or not to keep an email newsletter subscription:

If the newsletter content and RSS feed content are identical, I go for the RSS feed
If the newsletter is highly personalized (and I don’t mean just the salutation), I keep my newsletter subscription. If one day however the personalized version of the newsletter would be available through RSS, I might still make the switch.
If the content of the newsletter is highly time-sensitive, I keep the newsletter subscription. RSS feeds have a lower priority than my email inbox.
If the email newsletter offers extras compared to the RSS feed, I keep the newsletter subscription.
If the email newsletter offers a clever aggregation of website content, I sometimes keep the newsletter subscription.
If the email newsletter offers content that is just sporadically interesting and there is no RSS feed, I unsubscribe. I would still rather subscribe to a RSS feed that delivers only once in while an interesting post between a bunch of uninteresting stuff, than to a newsletter offering the same content.

I guess it once again comes down to delivering the right content through the right channel. And RSS turned out to be a channel indeed.

what’s on a web’s mind?

the markITeer — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 09:50:12 +0000

In one of the first posts on this blog, I tried to unravel the web 2.0. Today I’d like to take this idea a couple of steps further by presenting you a mindmap of web 2.0 related terms, technologies and examples in an attempt to guide you through the maze that is web 2.0.

Don’t think of this as a complete, finished, never-to-be-changed sort of thing. This is merely a first draft which I’m hoping to improve and extend using your input.

So please feel free to comment by using the form below!

Ready to dive in? Then hold your breath and jump.

A little legend to get you started :

P.S. The map was created using a nice online tool called Mindomo. It’s a great example of a Rich Internet Application (R.I.A.) build using Flex (the programmer’s equivalent of Flash).

The Bush Files: clients, servers and protocols

the markITeer — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 09:32:56 +0000

This post is part of a series of things ‘everybody-assumes-you-know-but-actually-you-don’t-have-a-clue’.
I call them : the Bush Files.
Today : clients, servers and protocols

If you want to understand how the Internet works, why it is you sometimes have to wait for a webpage to appear or why almost every web address starts with ‘http://’, you must learn about the most important thing that makes the web happen: the client-server model.

The first player in the client-server model is the client. A client can be any program that can access the Internet and wants to retrieve information from it. For instance a web browser, who wants to retrieve web pages, or an e-mail client who wants to retrieve email messages. But in order to get the information they want, somebody has to provide it to them. And that’s where our second player enters the stage: the server. A server is any program that can access the Internet and is able to provide information to the clients. There are servers specialized in delivering web pages, other servers know how to deliver email messages and so on.

You could compare this to going shopping: You, the client, want to get e.g. the latest Radiohead cd (rumoured to be released fall 2007!), and the store (aka the server) can give it to you.

There is however one thing still missing in this story: we assume that the client and server can understand each other! What if you would walk into a record store in China asking for your cd in Dutch? It is very important that the client and the server know how to communicate! That’s why different protocols were invented that define how a request and a response have to be created in order for the server to understand what the client is asking for, and for the client to understand the server’s answer.

For the exchange of web-based information (web pages, RSS feeds etc.), the http protocol is used, which stands for HyperText Transfer Protocol. For the exchange of files, FTP (File Transfer Protocol) can be used, and for the exchange of emails SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) can be used. Makes sense, doesn’t it? And maybe you recognize this acronyms? If you enter a URL in your web browser, the first thing you have to enter is which protocol your browser should use to get the information you’re looking for e.g. http://markiteer.wordpress.com.

So, let’s recap using some day-to-day examples:

1. I want to view a web page:
First I type in the web address, let’s say https://markiteer.wordpress.com, into the address location bar of my web browser. My web browser, being a typical client, will then connect to the server where this website resides asking for the web page using the http protocol. The server knows this protocol and can deliver the web page back to the client. The client (your web browser) will then render it for me to view it.

2. I want to read an email:
I open my email reader (e.g. Outlook). Being a client, it will contact a mail server asking it for new email messages using the smtp protocol. The mail server understands what the client is asking for and can deliver the new messages. My Outlook will than render the email messages so I can view them.

3. I want to upload a file:
I open my FTP program (eg. CuteFTP, LeechFTP, …). This client will connect to a server I specify to which I want to upload my file. Using the FTP protocol, the client will send the file to the server. The server will understand this and send back a message that it successfully received the file.

That’s all there is to it. And once you’ve got the hang of this easy principle, the working of most Internet-based applications suddenly will become a lot clearer.

The Future of Communications – A Manifesto for Integrating Social Media into Marketing

the markITeer — Tue, 26 Jun 2007 10:28:40 +0000

Social media is everywhere. Websites like MySpace, Facebook, YouTube and numerous blogging platforms attract millions of visitors from all over the world. Visitors that are not just passing by to see what’s going on, but are willing to participate in discussions, upload content and make themselves heard. Web 2.0 has given a clear voice to the people. People who might well be your customers. Or your customers-to-be. That’s why it’s important for companies and marketers to connect to social media and lay out an integrated communications strategy not based on the old monologue, but on dialog.

Brian Solis of FutureWorks PR put together a manifesto for integrating social media into marketing. He emphasizes the importance of not only diving in, but -more important- of making the mental shift. Find your audience, find the influencers, listen to them, get involved.

A few quotes:

“It’s an understanding that social media is about sociology and less about technology. It’s a mashup of new and traditional media that spans across advertising, PR, customer service, marcom, sales, and community relations.”

“The key point here is that Social Media has yet to reveal its true impact. While many are defining its future, the majority of people around the world have yet to embrace it and participate. This means that it’s only going to become more pervasive and as such, become a critical factor in the success or failure of any business.”

“Listening is marketing.
Participation is marketing.
Media is marketing.
Conversations are marketing.
Comments are marketing.”

“Everything we’re integrating into the marketing mix is aimed at sparking and cultivating not only conversations, but relationships. It’s humanizing companies and their products and services so that they matter to people.”

“In order to reach people, we have to figure out who they are and where they go for information. In the process, you’ll quickly discover that there is no magic bullet for reaching everyone – all at once”

“Remember, the future of communications introduces sociology into the marketing strategy. The technology is just that, technology. The tools will change. The networks will evolve. Mediums for distributing content will grow.”

“By listening, reading, and participating, corporate marketing will be smarter and more approachable than ever before. This is how we humanize brands, create loyalty, and earn customer’s business.”

You can read the full manifesto here and here.

Hacker’s Paradise

the markITeer — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 13:17:48 +0000

Imagine a world where all billboards are digital…

Putting your presentations online

the markITeer — Mon, 18 Jun 2007 15:17:00 +0000

Marketers create presentations. Lots of presentations. Presentations for clients, presentations for management, presentations to show a new product or to launch an idea, presentations to bundle information or presentations to convince the inconvincible. Some of these presentations are top secret, classified. But a whole lot of them are just waiting for a larger audience, waiting to bring you eternal fame and glory.

And that’s where Web 2.0 comes in: the ‘social web’ presents you with the audience whereas SaaS (‘Software as a Service’) offers you a whole bunch of online tools to rocket your presentations into cyberspace.

SlideShare, SlideBurner, AUTHORstream… there’s a whole lot of websites out there offering you the possibility to upload your presentation and show it to a community. The idea is simple: you register, you upload a presentation, the presentation is converted into a Flash file, some previous and next buttons are added and the whole thing is put on their website for everybody to view and comment on. And just like with eg YouTube, your converted presentation can also be embeded into websites and blogs using some simple code.

Having your slides available on the web this way is very nice. But something really important will still be missing: you. Slides are often just a framework for your presentation and the real convincing is in how you bring the message. That’s why Zentation came up with the brilliant idea of letting you synchronize your Powerpoint presentation with video material posted to Google video. After logging in, you upload your presentation and enter the URL of your video. You can then synchronize both by simply clicking a button next to the slide when the video reaches the point that the slide has to appear. And they too offer code so you can embed the result into your web page or blog. Check out Guy Kawasaki’s blog for an example (and a good presentation).

Here’s a small comparison table of some of the players:

As for the technical side, there are some issues with the conversion to Flash you have to take into account:

animations might (and mostly will) not work
slide transitions might (and mostly will) not work
exotic fonts might not be recognized
the appearance of bulleted lists might be altered

For those looking for something more: check out Adobe Connect, WildPresenter PRO or Articulate. These tools enable you to create fully-fletched online presentations with all the bells and whistles you want. it’s another league… with other rules regarding costs and time-to-deploy.

To round up, here’s a funny video by stand-up comedian Don McMillan on creating Powerpoints:

Getting Real

the markITeer — Thu, 14 Jun 2007 13:33:25 +0000

Now here’s a must read: ‘Getting Real’ by 37signals. 37signals is the company behind the Web 2.0 application classic ‘Basecamp‘ and the Ruby-on-Rails development framework. And although the subtitle says that it’s about ‘the smarter, faster, easier way to build a succesful web application’, it’s about a lot more…

‘Getting Real’ is really a book on how to cope with ever-changing demand and on how to keep up with (and get ahead of) competition. It’s about how to survive in a fast-moving world and how to take full advantage of the present-day possibilities of the Internet when creating a presence on the web.

In two words, ‘Getting Real’ promotes being lean and agile: small teams, no more months of writing functional specifications, no more useless meetings, limited functionalities, focusing on what matters, … It’s formatted as a series of essays bundled into chapters covering the whole process from idea to support and post-launch. Very well written, very easy to understand.

Check it out at http://gettingreal.37signals.com/. You can read it for free online, or you can buy a copy ($19 for the PDF version, $29 for the paperback).

Not convinced? This is what marketing guru Seth Godin has to say about it:
“Every once in a while, a book comes out of left field that changes just about everything. This is one of those books. Ignore it at your peril.”

Adobe AIRs Apollo

the markITeer — Tue, 12 Jun 2007 09:33:20 +0000

Yesterday, Adobe released a beta version of its framework for Rich Internet Applications. The framework, previously known by the codename ‘Apollo’ is now called ‘AIR’ : Adobe Integrated Runtime. Shame that they gave it such a ‘techy’ name, because it’s actually something really pretty: It allows you to port Rich Internet Applications from the web to the desktop.

And so the lines between Internet and desktop applications are starting to blur…

AIR is a small (9MB) piece of software you have to install on your computer. Once installed, you’re ready to run any AIR application available. Think of it like the Flash plug-in: you install it once and you can see all flash-enabled websites. The beauty is that, just like Flash, AIR applications are also platform-independent. After you installed your version of AIR, you can run any AIR application you want on your desktop, whether you’re on Mac or PC!

To create AIR applications, Adobe pushes of course it’s own Flex development environment, which is kind of the programmers equivalent of Flash aimed towards creating Rich Internet Applications. But you could also use the plain old HTML and JavaScript web technologies (and AJAX) to built your web application and port it to the desktop using AIR. Needless to say that AIR will also be fully supported by Adobe’s Flash and DreamWeaver products in the new CS3 product suite…

To make the story complete, Adobe teamed up with Google to deliver real off-line capabilities to online applications using Google’s recently launched Google Gears. This open-source browser plugin installs a very light-weight database on your computer that can be used when online applications -which often depend on a database- are taken offline. As an example of this, Google made it’s own RSS reader available offline. If you have a Google Reader account, be sure to check out the ‘Offline’ link at the top of the application. It allows you to read your RSS feeds even when you’re not connected to the Internet!

Although all this may sound very technical, it really is the next big killer app out there. And what’s more: it’s a nice example of the convergence trend going on between Internet applications and desktop applications. It’s a new game and all the big boys are playing: Adobe (AIR), Google (Google Gears), Microsoft (SilverLight), Sun (JavaFX), …Time to place your bets…

Here’s a demo of the eBay AIR application given some time ago by Mike Downey from Adobe:

To test it yourself, download the AIR beta from http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/air.html and check out some neat examples (at this point, the eBay desktop example shown in the video is not live yet).

“I need those numbers!”

the markITeer — Thu, 07 Jun 2007 14:29:20 +0000

Just this week, I had the conversation below … twice.
Makes you think why it is exactly that we want all those numbers, graphs and dashboards…

[client]: Hey, guess what: we are going to redesign our website!
[markITeer]: Great!
[client]: Yes, our website is such a success that we really need to upgrade it. Just yesterday we had nearly 700 visitors! How cool is that! We have this really nice website analytics software showing us all the numbers in real time online with nice-looking graphs and tables. It was the one thing I insisted on when building our previous website. Every morning I take a quick look at the number of visitors we got the day before. Reminds me that we should definitely put that in our new site as well.
[markITeer]: good idea!
[client]: By the way: I started to work out a completely new sitemap. Would you mind taking a look at it?
[markITeer]: Not at all.

– a nice diagram with a maze of blocks and arrows is layed out on the table –

[client]: I took the topics of the current website and re-arranged them a little. I also added a few new things like a blog and a searchable event calendar.
[markITeer]: What is the goal of your website? What are the most important topics to you?
[client]: uhm… everything?
[markITeer]: OK, then maybe we could start from what’s important to your customers and prospects. What are your visitors looking for on your current website? What pages are they visiting most frequently? What keywords do they use to find your site in the search engines?

– silence –

How many of our actions do we base on those numbers we can’t live without? Honestly?

the Bush Files: Web Services

the markITeer — Wed, 06 Jun 2007 14:52:37 +0000

This post is part of a series of things ‘everybody-assumes-you-know-but-actually-you-don’t-have-a-clue’.
I call them : the Bush Files.
Today : Web Services

Although there are a lot of interpretations of the term ‘web services’, it’s most commonly used to describe a set of functionalities of an application that are made available to other applications over the Internet.

For example: Google has a web service allowing you to use their famous search capabilities from within your own web application. You might create your own search box, ask Google for the results of the search via the web service, and show the results any way you like on your web page. Or you might use the web service of Google Maps to (programmatically) ask Google for a map of your region, mark your house, your cafe and the place you walk the dog and publish the result on your website. Schematically, this would look like this:

It doesn’t always have to be this visible though: You could also use a web service to e.g. store information in some database somewhere on the web every time a user fills out a form on your website, as pictured below.

Applications talking to each other via functions that the applications made available, is not new. The common name for this in the programming world is API: Application Programming Interface, or a way for applications to programmatically interface with each other. Add the web in between the applications, and you understand why Web Services are also often referred to as “Web API‘s”.

Typically, the communication between the applications over the Internet will be done through SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol): a set of rules (or ‘protocol’) designed to transfer data in a specific dialect of XML over the Internet. So the applications basically talk XML to each other! And a description of the functionalities that can be used, is made available in a WSDL file (Web Services Description Language), which is basically… also XML (click here for the Google search WSDL, you can find functions in there like ‘doGoogleSearch’ and ‘doSpellingSuggestion’).

There are a lot of issues involved in creating and using web services, none of the least is security. But overall it has opened up a lot of possibilities and nowadays powers a great lot of the Service Oriented Architecture (see ‘Web 2.0 unraveled‘) pillar of Web 2.0.

Identity 2.0

the markITeer — Mon, 04 Jun 2007 14:57:47 +0000

With the interactivity levels on the Internet rising and the number of social websites exploding, identity is becoming more and more important. A different registration for every web site leaves web users with a sense of irritation… and a pile of passwords.

In the presentation below, Dick Hardt of Sxip Identity discusses the future of online identity in his own, brilliant style. Sit back and enjoy.

(un)defining spam

the markITeer — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 07:23:10 +0000

Each workshop on e-mail marketing and spam, I start with a seemingly simple question: “What is spam?”.
This is how it mostly goes:

[markITeer]: Does anybody know what spam is?
[John]: Of course: emails I don’t want to receive.
[markITeer]: So if your best friend sends you an email that you didn’t want to receive, it’s spam?
[John]: no… spam is about emails I don’t want to receive from people I don’t know
[markITeer]: So if a friend of your best friend sends you that same email, mentioning your best friend as a reference, you would consider it spam?
[John] hmmm… no….
[Tom] I think I would
[Lydia] Doesn’t spam always have some commercial message?
[markITeer]: So spam is a commercial email you don’t want from somebody you don’t know? Suppose you were looking for a new car six months ago and you received an incredible offer for the car of your dreams from a garage in your town (someone you didn’t know personally). Then according to this definition it might not be spam. But if you would receive that same email now, after you bought your dream car, it would be?
[Lydia]: hmmm… maybe… I don’t know.
[Tom]: Couldn’t you say that spam always involves large volume sendings?
[markITeer]: So you judge an e-mail you receive by how many people received it?
[Tom]: hmmm… no
-silence-
[markITeer]: Anybody?

And that’s why spam filters will never be perfect…

Technology at the fingertips

the markITeer — Thu, 31 May 2007 15:47:19 +0000

Did you ever see a sci-fi movie in which they had some really cool gadgets that you just had to have… if they would exist? Or in which they used some pretty amazing technology-yet-to-be-invented? Well, today Microsoft turned a little piece of science fiction into science faction with the launch of Microsoft Surface.

Microsoft Surface is a device that could well be the next step in how we interact with computers and applications. Forget the keyboard, forget the mouse. Just a 30″ diagonal touch-sensitive display table giving you access to your applications using nothing but your fingers. Sounds just like touch-screens? Not quite: it goes a lot further: Surface also allows interactions with other objects placed on top of it, like eg mobile phones, mp3 players (I wonder if it’s gone be iPod or Zune ), … So you could copy pictures from your digital camera onto your mobile phone just by placing them both on the Surface and drag them -using your fingers- from one device to the other.

Or imagine this: you’re looking for a new mobile phone. You walk into a store and want some information on the latest models. You place them on the MS Surface counter and immediately a comparison table appears of all the features of the mobile phones you picked out. Pretty neat, ey!

In terms of advertising, the possibilities are virtually limitless. Think of it as digital signage (the TV screen advertising networks in stores etc) … turning interactive. Not so long ago I posted an article on the LUON blog on the touch-screen ad by Nokia for its new N95 mobile phone. Very impressive campaign, but imagine what you could do with a device like Surface…

Technically, it consists of:

a piece of holographic glass
a projector that can shoot images at the glass
two cameras, aimed at the glass
a computer running a version of Windows Vista
software written in Windows Presentation Foundation

Want to see it in action? Take a look at this video:

Web syndication: on RSS, Atom, Kings and Queens

the markITeer — Tue, 29 May 2007 09:35:59 +0000

Why do people visit a website? What makes them return? What makes them talk about your website? Or link to it?
Relevant content is the number one treasure on the web everybody is looking for. Yes, the old saying still goes : “content is King”. And now the King got himself some nice looking Queens: meet RSS and Atom.

But first a couple of words on web syndication in general. Web syndication means that you offer your most recent content (“What? My precious content?”), preferably for free (“WHAT?!”) to the web community for them to incorporate into their websites or to read via special readers. Of course, you will only offer content that is not sensitive. And you’ll probably just give them a title, a brief summary and a link to the full article… on your website (” Ahhh! “). In other words: you use your content as some sort of advertising to drive traffic to your website.

The technology used to achieve this is plane old XML: on your website you offer your (stripped-down) content in XML format. This is called a feed. Typically, you would make it accessible from one of the well-known logo’s, like or , of which the second one lately is becoming more and more wide-spread (see also http://feedicons.com/). Anyone can then embed this feed in his own website (like I did with the LUON blog on the right), or add it to his feed reader (or ‘feed aggregator’), an application used to easily view and follow feeds from different websites (did you already check out Google reader!?). This is also referred to as ‘subscribing‘ to a feed. Take note that because your feed only contains your content without layout, the subscriber can present it in any layout he wants!

The XML you offer must follow a couple of rules. You must use predefined tags and structures (ie an XML schema) to describe your content, so that everybody can ‘understand’ what you’re talking about: what the title is, what the summary is etc.

There are currently two ‘standards’ around : RSS (Really Simple Syndication) and Atom (in walk the Queens). Both are in fact XML schema’s describing how you could structure your XML and which tags you could use to offer your content as a feed. RSS uses ‘item’ to describe an article, Atom uses ‘entry’. RSS uses a ‘description’ tag for the summary, Atom uses a ‘summary’ tag. And so on, and so on. For a detailed comparison between the two, read Tim Bray’s comparison piece. That’s why you often see two icons : one for RSS, and one for Atom.

Finally: take a look at this fun video introduction to RSS posted on YouTube:

Zamzar

the markITeer — Thu, 24 May 2007 15:54:50 +0000

Just discovered a nice little tool on the net : Zamzar.
Via the website, you can automatically convert files from one type into another. Eg. from MS Word into PDF, from GIF into JPG, … You can even convert any YouTube movie into a downloadable video format! How about that! Just follow the 4 simple step, wait a little and you receive an email with a link to the converted file.

This kind of applications you can use over the Internet, without having to download or install anything, are in web 2.0 terms described as ‘Software as a Service’, short : SaaS. Typically, users don’t pay for owning the software (because they don’t ), but for using it. But no worries : in the case of Zamzar, it’s totally free!

And if the whole SaaS story sounds vaguely familiar: yes, it is indeed exactly the same as the old Application Service Provider (or: ASP) model. The old sheep just got a new fur…

the Bush Files: XML

the markITeer — Wed, 23 May 2007 07:50:16 +0000

This post is the first in a series of things ‘everybody-assumes-you-know-but-actually-you-don’t-have-a-clue’.
I call them : the Bush Files.
Today : XML

XML stands for eXtensible Markup Language.
Let’s start with the last part first : It’s a language, a way of communication, of sharing data, mostly between two applications. But it’s not just a language, it’s a ‘markup‘ language. This means that it combines text and extra information about this text. In the case of XML, it’s information about the structure of the text. Finally, it’s extensible, meaning that you can extend the language, invent new ‘words’, so you can have it say exactly what you want it to say.

let’s take a look at a simple example:


	
		The Da Vinci Code
		Dan Brown
	
	
		The Lord Of The Rings
		J.R.R. Tolkien

What does this tell us?
1. XML is readable: it’s just text and can be read in any text editor, like eg Notepad. Handy!
2. the extra information about our text is put in descriptive ‘tags’ between ‘<‘ and ‘>’
3. text is put in between opening and closing tags: eg …… . The opening tag, text and closing tag together are called an element
4. There is 1 element containing all data. In our example this is the …. element
5. inside an opening tag, you can also put some extra information in an attribute : eg ISBN=”1400079179″>

The fun thing is, you can invent any tags and attributes you want, as long as the one you’re sending the XML to ‘speaks’ the same language… That’s why, once a language has been defined between the sender(s) and the receiver(s) of the XML, it can be described in a schema. That way, everybody knows which words can be used so that every-one can understand what the others say.

If you speak the correct language, use the words you and the other people/programs that have to work with the XML have defined, the XML is said to be valid. If your XML is syntacticly correct (see items 3 & 4 above), it is said to be well-formed.

So, that’s basically all there is to XML. Not so difficult, he?

P.S. If you take a close look at HTML, the language used for building web pages, you’ll see … that it’s really XML with it’s own pre-defined tags and attributes! The original HTML wasn’t really well-formed though. That’s why they invented XHTML, which is the same as HTML, but this time fully well-formed.

Why images don’t show in e-mails

the markITeer — Tue, 22 May 2007 13:08:41 +0000

Ever wondered why you receive all your emails without the images?
If you’re using MS Outlook, Google Mail, Windows Live Hotmail or any of the quadrillion other email readers that suppress images, chances are you did.

The reason behind this phenomenon is to protect you against spammers: By using the images in (HTML) e-mails, spammers can figure out if your email address is valid!

So how does it work?

When sending out HTML e-mails (ie emails containing layout code, images etc.), only the text and layout are sent while the images are kept on a web server. Only when the recipient opens the email and requests to see the images, the images are loaded from the web server.

This has the advantage that images must only be sent to people requesting to see them, and the requests are spread over time, thus optimizing the bandwith usage. But more important: when the images are requested from the web server, the request can be logged! This way the sender knows which email addresses have requested the images, and hence which email addresses are valid!

In a nice picture this is what happens:

This system is used by spammers as well as legitimate email marketeers: Spammers use it to identify which email addresses are valid so they know which addresses they can use again (and again and again… ), while self-respecting email marketeers use it to calculate their open rates.
But in the heat of the spam battle, email marketeers had to give in and images were suppressed by all major email applications, resulting in much less trusty open rates (and email marketeer’s headaches)…

There are however a few things email marketeers can do to deal with the issue:

try to get listed in the address book of the recipient. Senders who are in the address book are automatically ‘white-listed’ and the images will always show!
add a ‘view email online’ link to an online version of the email
include alt tags for your images describing your images
use text-based ads
focus on click-through rates and conversion rates
…

for more tips: check out the EmailGarage website

Jacob Nielsen vs Web 2.0

the markITeer — Mon, 21 May 2007 08:38:20 +0000

In an article on the BBC news website, usability guru Jacob Nielsen accuses web firms of neglecting good design while rushing into the ‘Web 2.0 hype’. I tend to disagree.

To prove his point, Mr. Nielsen attacks the web communities and user generated content:

“The main criticism or problem is that I do not think these things [communities, user generated content] are as useful as the primary things“

“Most people just want to get in, get it and get out”

“Web firms rushing to serve the small, committed minority might find they make a site far less useful to the vast majority who come to a site for a specific purpose. “

First of all, Web 2.0 is more than the social web of communities. What about Service Oriented Architectures? What about Rich Internet Applications (see also ‘Web 2.0 unraveled‘)?

Secondly: Of course the basic information should be made easily accessible on any website. But I personally haven’t experienced any difficulties in finding it. In my opinion, communities and user generated content are offered more as an extension to the basics than as a replacement.

Thirdly, the ‘new design guidelines’ of Web 2.0 (large fonts, central layout, simple navigation, …) are a huge improvement in terms of readability and information access…. when properly used of course. But there will always be bad examples of good ideas.

Finally, I think Mr. Nielsen makes a very dangerous statement with his ‘attack’. I hoped for a more nuanced approach from a name with such an influence. But than again… attacking Web 2.0 nowadays is even more of a hype than Web 2.0 itself

Flickrvision

the markITeer — Wed, 16 May 2007 09:09:29 +0000

In my previous post I told you something about service oriented architectures (SOA’s) as part of Web 2.0.

Well, now check this out: Flickrvision.com
Flickr is a typical 2.0 website for community-based sharing of photographs. Put this in the blender with Google’s mapping service, and you get Flickrvision: a continuous presentation of uploaded pictures, shown on a world map.

In technical terms this is called a ‘mash-up‘ : mixing two or more services to deliver a new service…

Maybe an idea for Nokia, Sony-Ericsson, … to have a branded version of this showing the pictures people take world-wide with their mobile phone?

Web 2.0 unraveled

the markITeer — Tue, 15 May 2007 07:59:27 +0000

Ok, so what is this web 2.0 all about?

For starters: it isn’t all just a hype. It’s more of an idea of where the web is heading after the dot com collapse.
It was first mentioned by Dale Dougherty, VP of O’Reilly, back in 2004. And since then, it was adopted by the web community at large.

Web 2.0 is built upon 3 pillars:

Rich Internet Applications (RIA’s) :
It is the aim of web 2.0 to bring the experience of using a desktop application to the web. No more Godot-like waiting for pages to refresh, no more going from one page to another to traverse all functionalities, … In other words: a web application should be as user-friendly as using a typical desktop application like MS Word. Take a look at the latest Google applications and you’ll see what I mean: Google docs, Google maps, …

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) :
SOA is a design principle saying that functionalities that different parties provide on the Internet, can be individually accessed over the Internet by other parties and can be used by these other parties as a part of a new service. Example: NASA has satellite images of virtually any place on the planet. TeleAtlas has loads of digital map data. If both make their services available over the Internet, a party like Google might pick up the idea of using it’s search engine to look for places and show the results on a map by TeleAtlas and a satellite image by NASA

the social web :
In Web 2.0, the user is in control. It is the user who provides the content, it is the user who decides what is important and what’s not. Instead of linking documents, the Social Web will link people, organizations, and concepts. For marketeers, this means that the end-user of your product or service now has been given a much stronger voice. Through blogs, podcasts or other publishing channels, the user can make or break you. At the other side, all these new ways of communication can be used by you -the marketeer- as well to reach out to your audience, and possibly a whole range of new audiences. Take for instance a look at the RED page at MySpace or remember the Lonely Girl 15 hype on YouTube…

All three pillars have their own technologies and applications such as AJAX, Flash/Flex, Silverlight, widgets and mash-ups, Twitter, Flickr and Digg and much, much, much more. But that’s for a next time…

The machine is us/ing us

the markITeer — Thu, 10 May 2007 08:25:03 +0000

Although a lot of posts concerning the ins and outs of Web 2.0 will still follow, the introductory video created by Mike Wesch of the Kansas State University is a very fun way to dive into the hype.

Never mind if it doesn’t make much (marketing) sense to you at this point. Just sit back and enjoy.

and that’s why…

the markITeer — Wed, 09 May 2007 15:37:48 +0000

This morning I was invited by one of the account managers of a big web analytics player. Nice man. Properly dressed. Very friendly. Nice demo too. Well prepared sales speech.
At one point we were talking integration with other applications.
“What do yo mean exactly by ‘web services'”? he asked me.

That’s why I started this blog.
Because probably nobody ever bothered to explain him what web services are.
Or not in a language that doesn’t require complex decoding algorithms anyway…

this is cell 1 on row 1	this is cell 2 on row 1
this is cell 1 on row 2	this is cell 2 on row 2