Tourism Futures 2050

I was privileged to be invited along to participate on the NZ Tourism 2050 Future Maker project and workshop to discuss themes and issues that NZ will face in the next 40 years. I was in the unfortunate position to be a technologist trying to predict trends 40 years out. Lucky me. I pick… tele-porters… and Mars tourism? 40 years is an eternity.  I don’t think 40 years ago my parents thought their grandchildren would be tweeting and FaceBooking from things called iPhones.

Interestingly there were two strong themes that came up time and time again in the discussions. They were quite different but I saw them to be critically intertwined.

The first issue is the broad one of technology, and everything got lumped in together in this one from the social web, mobile payments, augmented reality, connectivity and mobile information tools. The one thing everyone agreed is that technology is changing the way people interact and make decisions when they travel. Interestingly one of the greatest fears/opportunities was the power of social networks, social communication and viral ideas. I say this is both a fear and an opportunity as clearly the affect can be either positive or negative.

The other top issue was on of our image as 100% pure, clean and green and preserving this and leveraging more off our natural beauty in a world where the environment is going to hell in a handbasket.

Why are these intertwined? Well once upon a time you used the glossiest of brochure with the most stunning of photos promising the best experiences in all your tourism marketing, and then hoped, when the traveller arrives, to deliver on the experience. Today there is a fear of social media within tourism, and I don’t expect this is limited to NZ tourism operators. What if we say we are 100% pure and the world discovers we are not quite 100%, perhaps only 85%, but worse, tweets, blogs and tells all their friends and followers.  What if someone has a bad time? What if the next viral thing is a video of a bad experience or image that breaks the illusion of our 100% clean and green image. This image is our marketing capital.

The reality is with more and more people using their social web connections as their primary source of information, this image could be damaged if we as a whole can not live up to what we are promising. Driven from the Auckland Airport into the city before? Been discussing high intensity beef farming lately? Shipped any coal to china lately? Okay you cant expect everything to be 100% squeaky clean and I don’t think that our 100% pure image is so misleading that an angry internet mob will develop and something viral will spread tarnishing our image and turning the world off of visiting our shores. Of course New Zealand is a beautiful and amazing place. Some of our less cellubrious “scenes” are so so. But today is there is a risk of painting a perfect image to sells plane tickets and beds, and have people picking on all the bad images around NZ that are in direct contrast and have this influence the way they talk about and describe New Zealand socially? Like I say if expectations are consistently not met, there will be negative comments and these will turn off others.  Nothing has changed here, it is the age old power of word of mouth, it is just that technology allows people to share this information more readily.

So forgetting the 100% pure image for now, this marketing campaign has worked well for us for so long but it may be up for an overhaul soon. The pervasiveness of technology in our lives today and the ability for people to enable others to vicariously share their experiences means that whatever our strategy is, we have to be somewhat genuine in how we promote anything online, whether it is NZ as a whole, a bed and breakfast, or a scenic walk. But don’t fear being caught out for not living up to expectations (I think it is in our national psyche to underrate ourselves) but even better than that focus on making sure the traveller gets the best experience they can possibly have and then enable them to use the social web to do all the good marketing for you. You can’t control what people say, but you sure can positively influence it.

So one asset we have got is our natural beauty. Another asset is our people. Nobody is more passionate about New Zealand than New Zealanders. What if we connected travellers to New Zealand with kiwis online? What if we got kiwis to describe places in blog posts. Share trip ideas “If you are coming to Auckland then you NEED to do …”.  Share their own views, photos or videos of their New Zealand.  This would create an opportunity for travellers to see NZ through our eyes before they come.

What if tourism operators participated in FourSquare, new checkins today get a complimentary coffee with breakfast, 10% off a bungee. What if we really engaged as a country with visitors online socially? No not just a FaceBook page, something smarter and engaging. Travel is all about seeing new things and meeting new people, and sharing the experience with others. We can make it easier for visitors to connect both with New Zealanders and their own friends back home.

We need to find ways to enable all the organizations tasked with promoting New Zealand as a whole, or particular districts, to engage with travelers online and encourage them to share their experiences while they are here and still on the buzz of jumping off a bridge with a bungee around their ankles. Let them tell the world NZ is 100% cool, 100% awesome, 100% the best country they have ever visited, in their own words. Enable people to have genuine positive conversations.  The technology is there so what’s the hold up?

The first barrier, as I talk about above, is the willingness of the tourism industry to engage, but I think we can overcome that.  There is a second major barrier.   We need to find ways to let tourists connect online while they travel without crippling data roaming costs or oppressive WIFI fees. Right now tourists don’t often tweet, and post up photos on the go while they are actually feeling the buzz because to do so would make them broke. Free or cheap ubiquitous WIFI is unheard of. We need to make it easier for travellers to remain connected while they are here.

Here are some ideas:

• Telecom/Vodafone partner with Tourism NZ to offer tourist SIMs with prepaid data and calls. Sure you can do this now but it is not at the front of a travellers mind to have to go out of their way to source a prepaid SIM for their phone. These should be on sale at the airport and at the reception of their accommodation packaged up in deals specially for tourists. It should be cheap and accessible.
• A partnership with a national WIFI network. What if Tomizone was packaged up to tourists and gave the traveller special online discounts for accommodation and activities only available through the Tomizone network?  There is benefit for all there.
• The i-SITEs. What is their future? Well one thing to make them more valid is to offer free WIFI for travellers. Perhaps even serve drinks and evolve into a travellers meeting place.
• At the very least accommodation providers need to offer their WIFI for free.

I think the fear of bad exposure through social media is not 100% justified. NZ really is a great destination (not that I am biased or anything) and for the most part I am sure everyone has an awesome time. The real fear, I believe, is that we are not able to capitalize off of the power of the social web. If we fear that people will say bad things to their friends then will will only discover that yes some people say bad things.  But what if we could facilitate travellers to share all their great comments and experiences?  One thing is for sure, a country our size and with our marketing budget, we need to maximize any opportunity the Internet and technology provides.  Pioneering an integrated approach of new technology and social media into our national tourism strategy may not be a bad start.

Rhys Darby, only 2 degrees of separation you know

Today’s interconnected world has torn down the barriers and now you can be 2 degrees of separation from the Queen (supposedly) and through social networks this certainly true, follow @rhysiedarby for example. Rhys even plugged my charity bike ride (but then we were mates so that’s like 1 degree of separation).

So we have a new mobile network launching, and who would you rather watch on the ads, Richard Hammond, or our very own Rhys? I know who is funnier.

Now, all 2degrees needs to do now is secure the domain name 2degrees.co.nz and their launch would go much more swimmingly. I do enjoy a drop of pinot now and then so no rush there guys

Sneak peak on the Telecom XT network… from the fringes

As you may or may not know I have currently put most of my digital work live on hold and am cycling up the country on a bicycle, tweeting, blogging and posting video as I go all over on http://www.nzuphill.co.nz.

Well, the other day I was given a new SIM card for the new Telecom XT network, which I quickly poked into my iPhone. And so I have come out of temporary hiatus on 8degrees.co.nz to let you know what I found. After a quick change to the APN setting on my iPhone I was away, calling and surfing on the new XT network, and THIS is what I found:

1. Coverage
2. 3G speeds
3. and all from the fringes of civilisation

I must confess I felt like a kid in a candy shop, as I rode my bike from small town to small town with a permanent 3G signal and pretty decent speeds. The speeds I have been getting are obviously not fast compared to a fixed line DSL, so don’t be expecting any crazy crazy speeds just yet, but considering I can do 3G things at good 3G speeds from places like Leigh and Mangawhai, well this is a new experience for me. And if I can get 3G from further up the line as I go, I must say, with only a little hesitation, I would be very very tempted to switch from my 15 year relationship with Vodafone (BellSouth pre Vodafone) and move to Telecom New Zealand if it allows me to make full use of the iPhone that Vodafone sold me, while sitting in my local Kerikeri cafe, where to date even a basic data connection on Vodafone is a rare thing depending on where you stand on the main street and if the sky is overcast.

So Vodafone will bump things up on their own network soon. Well they sure as hell have to, as within minutes I quickly moved (albeit temporally for the moment) onto what so far seems to be a faster broader network and I kept my phone. If I can have number portability to boot, then what’s to stop me? (apart from slightly more expensive data plans). I felt a little hurt that Vodafone let another network provide better toys first. What about all the 10’s of thousands of dollars I have sent their way over the years? Couldn’t some of it gone towards a better network before Telecom got their act together?

What confuses me is why didn’t Vodafone upgrade their network pre XT launch? I have heard from quite a few previously loyal Vodafone customers already saying they are very very tempted to move networks if all Telecom say is true. Well so far I am finding it to be very true, a dramatic improvement on the connections I have been getting on the Vodafone network. Sure it is not all about data speeds and coverage, there is all the other services that you should probably compare to be 100% apples with apples, but to be honest, my needs are pretty simple. I want fast data wherever I go. I don’t care much for voice mail, or the online interface I use to access my bill. I pay every month for fast data and good great coverage, because without those things I cant access my bill online and I can’t check my voice mail from anywhere I might be around our beautiful country.

So it is still early days yet. As I continue my mad mad cycle up the country I will be comparing coverage and data speeds as I go from my bike, from the tops of hills and down in the valleys. At the beach and in the middle of the towns that until now seem to have been forsaken by GSM networks. And if I decide I’m not going to stop at the lighthouse in Cape Reinga, well at least I have the option as a potential Telecom customer to roam to another foreign GSM network with my phone and continue my ride. Perhaps cycling from one side of Europe to the other… hmmm…

Make an online newspaper worth reading, please

A little while ago I saw a fantastic TED talk by Jacek Utko, who told us how through design he helped turn around flagging newspaper readership numbers in Eastern Europe through good design. He basically turned what was your standard boring and drab newspaper format and turned them in to a more designed and visually rich experience that readers wanted to hold, read and enjoy.

“Design can change not just your product, it can change your workflow, it can change your company. We just need inspiration, vision, and determination to operate at the highest level. To be good is not enough.” – Jacek Utko

It is no secret that newspapers are facing extinction in the print form. People are looking online for their source of news and current affairs and they don’t want to read yesterdays news any more. The monopoly on news is no longer tightly controlled by the media agencies. Each day they lose a little bit more control to independent blogs, websites, twitter and Facebook, although slowly, one by one the media agencies are buying these up in an attempt to maintain the control. No surprise there but they do this so they can continue to replicate a formula that has worked pretty well for them so far, which is.

1. Write some words about something topical which could be news, or opinion
2. Take a photo to make it more interesting (so it isn’t all just words)
3. Add lots of ads
4. Print it

Now, in an age where your teenage kids are producing videos, 3d animations, flash movies, and mashups in their bedrooms, why god why are the online “newspapers” not doing the same thing? Why must they cling so dearly to their archaic model for presenting the news? White paper, serif font, colour photo. Sure they have made the paper digital, but it is the same ole same ole when it comes to content. In fact, the print editions are more interesting and interactive, with their big awkward pages, and the occasional multi-page feature which has some nice colourful graphics.

For the online edition however, I would much rather look at something that is designed, and crafted, to stimulate and engage me. Just as Apple made a portable music thing-a-majiggy an object of desire through design, newspapers should try to do the same with their news. Seriously, lets take Jacek’s ideas another step further.

What if along side the “news”, newspapers made an actual attempt to add form to their current (and in many cases lacking) function. The first thing they could do is actually “design” their sites. Make them visually rich, easy to view, less cluttered and have some semblance of style. Things may not fit into tidy boxes and columns all the time, but they will just have to deal with that. But not only change the form of the news online into something more attractive in general, what if they, say, ran interactive features along side the day to day news, that gave you in-depth analysis on topical events. That’s the cool thing about the web, you don’t have to have just words and a photo. There are all sorts of cool things like Flash, JavaScript and Video. Plus each article is it’s own island, and is not connected to the rest of the news other than by a single link.

There is so much the format of the web allows you to do. For example, imagine if you can, a digital version of the traditional two-four page spread analysis piece. This digital version could be well designed visually to stand on its own as sort of a feature portal. It could be interactive, media rich and highly informative. Imagine still (are you still imagining?), as an actual example, a dedicated feature on the global financial crisis. This is a complicated story to report on because there are so many different levels of complexity to it, and it means different things to different people in how it effects them. Business readers will want to know different things to say, an at home dad, but both are desperate to understand the topic. Now you could give them a series of individual and non-connected articles on a daily basis that use text and a photo to communicate, or you could:

• Provide interactive graphs, and timelines demonstrating the scale of the crisis detailing critical events and the impacts on world markets over time. A nice interactive draggable graphic timeline would do this nicely. Here is a nice example at the NYT (its a nice start).
• Embedded YouTube style video of analysis. Here is a good one.
  
  The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.
• Add other interactive elements that provide visual analysis on the crisis. Like graphs. Lots and lots of graphs and data depicting the scale of bailouts and blowouts. I like pictorials and graphics.
• Use maps as a visualisation tool, here is an okay example, but you could do much more exciting things
• Provide links off to key news articles elsewhere within the site about the same topic. Link them coherently, like “To read more on the effect on the New Zealand economy…” . Visually group the articles together under subject headings so you can see related articles at a glance.
• Provide feeds from Twitter, so you can see what other people are thinking about the topic
• Have some fun, include a flash game or two.
• Wrap the whole feature up in a great fully themed design that stimulates you visually, and entices you to explore, and be informed. Make the whole thing an experience.

Or you could do this:

What is wrong with the above (the idea, not Kermit)? Well for one, newspapers are geared up to write text articles. They employ journalists and photographers. They syndicate text and photos through existing channels, that are used to text and photos. To start producing video, Flash, and other media formats they, the news agencies, would have to evolve considerably. How would the editorial process work? What are the costs involved? Could they outsource the creation of such things to people who are good at doing media rich content? Possibly. There is a whole web full of content out there that the online newspapers could be using, but by including information from various sources, feeds and other websites they are potentially losing control of your viewer-ship. They fear that you may wander off to the sources directly (the Internet lends itself well for this you know) and that means you may look at and click less ads in their website. Or worse, you might discover another site that is more informative and interesting than the newspapers.

For a newspaper to change from the crap format they have right now, and their sole reliance on advertising to something better and more engaging online, it will cost them. But, is this a new opportunity for them? Would you actually pay to be better informed and to get your news presented well?

What if they offered a free “news and ads” version of the site (this is pretty much what you get now). Then, what if for a month by month subscription you can get access to media rich, and more comprehensive detailed analysis on the news and current affairs. I want to be informed and to learn. I want the information in forms other than text and photos, and I understand that this costs money to produce. I am immune to online advertising anyway so they need a better model to earn revenue. I want to be entertained, and enjoy the news. If they priced it right I would pay.

Lets say they charged $4 a month (or a dollar a week), and perhaps 5% take up this new news+ option. If your online readership is 600,000 unique browsers a week/month/year, lets say that adds up to $100,000 a month in news+ subscriptions. That is $1.2M extra for an online news site like nzherald.co.nz, and for that money you can generate a lot of nice content. For you at home, for the price of a cup of coffee a week you can get your news looking better, more coherent and interactive. I would pay it.

Will it happen. I think it has to. News content on the Internet could be really interactive, engaging, and informative, but at the end of the day it might be hard work and they might need to adapt to new ideas. It will take some balls to change. Anyway, I made my New Years resolution to not read online newspapers. It might take a few more people to do the same before they change their ways.

stuff.co.nz re-launch

One of my new years resolutions was to not read the news online through the major news agencies and so far I am enjoying my decision. I am no less informed through other channels than I was before, either that or there is a lot of stuff that I just don’t care about because I don’t know about it. However, I heard that stuff.co.nz had relaunched so I had to check it out. Professional curiosity.

From stuff.co.nz’s own article on stuff about stuff here is how the new site is described;

Stuff, New Zealand’s leading news, sport and entertainment website, has been revamped and upgraded, with a fresh, new look, a range of new features and a major upgrade of the underlying technology to produce a faster, more user-friendly site.

First of all I think stuff.co.nz was well overdue for a makeover and change is good for Stuff, as it was looking a tad tired. However I am not convinced of the new look and usability just yet. It isn’t quite working for me (sometimes literally).

Things I am not so keen on

1. A customisable home-page you will never see.

One of the new innovations is a customisable home-page that you can tailor to give you the news you are interested in only. Hurrah, I love these features on other sites, especially on the customisable Google Home-page. However if you want to customise the Stuff home-page don’t get your hopes up too much. The top part of the home-page is fixed and you have no choice as to what content appears here. Fairfax does. To get to the areas you can customise you have to scroll down not one screen worth, but two screens worth of compulsory content, then you get your customised content. So the benefit of this is…? If I want to read the technology articles, instead of visiting the home-page and then scrolling down two screens, it is far easier for me to click the big convenient “Technology” link in the primary navigation. A user wants to see their customised content first, hell that’s why they bothered “customising” the page to start with.

Tip. As a user if I want to customise the home page, I want the things I am interested in at the top so I can easily find it. If you want to spam the user with compulsory content and ads on the home page, then dont make the home-page customisable. It offers no value.

2. Changing the nav on users.

Throughout the Stuff site, and all the other sister Fairfax sites, there is a nav bar right at the top of each and every page. This nav provides you links to all the sister sites, no matter where you are. On the Stuff home-page, it is there with links to all my favourite sister sites like Trade Me, Travelbug, Find Someone and Old Friends. In the middle of the home page is a big colourful navigation bar that has all the sections of the site linked to. Now, as I click into one of the sections of the Stuff site, the big colourful nav bar I just clicked on vanishes. WTF? Also the top sister site nav bar changes on me. It looks the same, but instead of linking to the sister sites, it now becomes the primary nav for the Stuff site, with links to the other sections like National, International, Business etc. So a user has just clicked into a section, and now the primary nav, the most important navigation device on a site, has effectively GONE. Not only that, another navigation device (for the sister sites) is also gone, and has transmogrified into the primary nav.

On the home page the navigation is big, bold and in a familiar place. Notice the sister site nav right at top.

Click on the Technology section and BAM, the navigation is gone! Oh wait, there it is, up the top right where it wasn't before... and now I can't go to Trade Me to sell my stuff.

Tip. Keep your primary navigation consistent! Exclamation mark for emphasis. As a user I don’t want to have to learn new things on each page. I have seen your home-page, which has established the main conventions of using the site for me. Don’t change these conventions! Please keep the navigation bar on every page in the same (or close enough to) the place it was on the home page.

3. The Search UI is Broken.

After recovering from the nav moving around on me, I really wanted to try out the Google search. I clicked the “Search site button” but alas I got a blank page . No error message, no nothing. I click back in my browser and tried again. After clicking around for a bit I relalised I was using the search wrong. The “Search Site” button is a form submit button, but I could not see the search input field and was clicking “Search Site” without specifying what I was searching on. Have a look below and see if you can spot what I was doing wrong.

Spot the search input field
(hint it is the white box with a white border on a white background.

Tip. Perhaps the search input field should be a little more defined or visible even. (I was using Firefox BTW so am not sure if this field is more visible on IE).

4. Confusing icons and interactions.

I wanted to remove some of the rubbish like “Life & Style” (what the hell is Life & Style). So there is a pencil icon to let me configure each of the panels. Awesome, here comes the customisation fun, I was excited. By clicking on the pencil I get a new row roll down underneath the colourful header. I wanted to remove the panel and what do you know, right underneath the pencil (where my mouse is as I just clicked on the pencil) is an . I click the and the config row vanishes, but the panel is still there with Prince Charles still grinning like a loon. What I should have done was click on the word “remove” which neither looks like a button nor a link and is all the way on the left.

Removing Prince Charles Step 1. Click pencil

Removing Prince Charles Step 2. Don’t click , click the word “remove”.

Plus, “remove” is the only option anyway, so I have to click the pencil, then remove to remove the panel, but remove is the only option. So why the pencil?

Tip. Instead, why not have the remove option instead of the config pencil. Then I can remove panels with only one click, not two. If at some point you need to give more config options for each panel, like being able to specify the type and the number of articles to show (which would be really useful), then reinstate the pencil. But right now it is just adding clicks.

4.1 And while I am talking about the configurable panels…

I can move the coloured panels around on the left, but not the panels on the right. If a panel is moveable, then give it an icon indicating this. At the top of the panels there is a good intro instruction that says:

But some content can not be moved. How do I know what can be moved and what can’t?

Tip. Why not put the icon for “Move content” (the arrows) that is includedin the instruction, in the panel headers of the panels that are movable?

5. Give me a sign-in form.

In order to configure the site pages, I need to register with My Stuff. When I registered with the site I got this brief confirmation message.

Success

You have had your email confirmed, you can now login.

But there is no login link or form. There is a tiny weeny [sign in] link up in the header of the site. But that says sign in, I want to login. This is something that catches me out often, so that’s why I look for it. Pick a terminology and stick with it. One day I will learn too.

Also once I have “Signed in” the “Sign in” link becomes “Logout”.

Tip. If you have just confirmed someone’s account, either sign them in auto-magically, or have a sign-in form right there on the confirmation page so the user doesn’t have to hunt around. Also be consistent with your terminology. It is either sign in or login. Sign in is better, and should also be inversely Sign out.

6. Slow.

The site is really slow to load, perhaps not dial-up over broadband speeds, but it is slow. And here is why:

• The home page is 1129.9K. That is a megabyte and a bit. Wow.
• It has 379K of JavaScript and 500k of images.
• It is made up of a whopping 230 HTTP requests.
• Too many JavaScript files. http://static.stuff.co.nz/js/jquery.js and http://static.stuff.co.nz/js/jquery.jqURL.js is included 9 times each. That is 16 requests that can be got rid of for a start. Another tip would be to combine all the scripts together into one request. The stuff.co.nz homepage has 230 http requests. A browser typically downloads two resources from the same host at a time. That is a lot of resources to load all up and simplifying the load of the JS into one file would provide a huge performance boost.
• There are no expires headers on a lot of the resources, so each page is asking for the same images, JavaScript and styles sheets again, and again and again. An expires header simply tells the browser when an element on a page is due to “expire”. If an image has an expires header of next Thursday, then each time you load the page (until next Thursday) your browser won’t ask for the image each time, instead it will just use the copy it downloaded last time. Expires headers are set relative to the first time your browser loads the resource. So images like photos may never need to expire as the wont change and stuff has set the expiry of these resources into the future to 2037 which is good, however there are a lot of reusable images being loaded from the CSS have an expire date of yesterday.
• Move all the JavaScript to the bottom of the page, please. The loading of scripts blocks parallel downloads. Normally your browser will have simultaneous connections for download page elements, so the browser will download two images at a time or more. However as scripts can affect the rendering of the DOM, if the browser needs to load a script, it blocks all other downloads until the script is loaded and executed. By moving all the JS to the bottom, before the close of the </body>, not only do you know the DOM is almost complete so your JS can interact with the DOM safely, all the other resources will have loaded so the JS won’t block any other requests.

7. Georgia, oh Georgia

I am not keen on Georgia font for the article titles, then having the content Helvetica. Pick either a serif font or a sans-serif font. Mixing them up looks ugly (in my book).

Tip. Go sans-serif, it will tie in with all the other Fairfax sites better. Verdana or Arial is good.

Things I like

The weather in the top left hand corner of the banner. 90% of the time I looked at you Stuff, all I wanted was the weather. Fabulous!

Over all it is a nice change. Aside from all my criticisms above, which can all be easily fixed, the new look is fresh. It is an improvement on the old stuff.co.nz. I think there are some nice ideas coming through in the new site. I understand it has just launched and there will be ongoing changes needed, as long as the site is refined and some of the things that I have mentioned get fixed I think it will make for an awesome news site.

I am not picking on things for the sake of picking on things. When I used to read the news online I loved Stuff, and I visited it several times a day. I would really love the new stuff.co.nz to be better. I give it a C+ in it’s current form, and I am sure Stuff will try harder and will make it better.

Twitter motivations?

Do you use Twitter? What are your motives for using it?

If you don’t know what I am talking about, Twitter is an emerging social networking phenomenon that lets anyone “tweet” in 140 characters or less their thoughts, opinions or just what they are doing, right at that moment. Anyone can follow your tweets, and you can follow others. By tuning into different people, you get a stream of thoughts and comments steadily flowing through to you, and you can participate in “the stream” by replying to people, or just adding your own thoughts undirected to anyone in particular.

If you have ever used a chat room, Twitter is kind-a like a “build-your-own” chat-room, where you choose the members you listen to, but they can’t necessarily hear you or each other. Sound confusing? Sound inane? Well it is a simple idea, which has strange addictive qualities that people all around the world are discovering.

Different people have different reasons for using Twitter. In it’s simplest form it is a tool for participating in conversations with your friends and associates. Some people manage only a small group of people they follow and the conversations are personal and relevant. For others it is a tool to build professional and personal networks. They follow industry conversations. For others it is a path to Internet stardom, and having large interested audiences they can entertain. For some it is a way to tap into the broad social consciousness, to get a feel for what people are thinking and talking about around the world.

Twitter can be many things to different people, but the common thread is that Twitter is a way to have a conversation with others.

Like always when a new idea starts to get traction, and a community builds around it, people inevitably starting to think how to make money through it, how to sell your wares through Twitter, how to “cash in”. If you say this to the early adopter users of Twitter, the initial reaction is “Gawd, keep those bastards out”, the bastards being of course the evil marketers and big bad corporates. Of course no one wants to be spammed through Twitter, along with everywhere else. But more and more companies are discovering that Twitter is a way to have conversations with their customers. Not selling to their customers, but talking with them. After all you can’t stop people from talking about you or your products bad or good, but you can choose to be part of that conversation. Besides, every person, as a user of Twitter, chooses who they want to listen to, so as soon as they get the sales pitch from a company they follow, they have the choice to turn off that conversation. For companies, the best way to engage with existing or new customers is to have genuine conversations that they want to participate in. It sounds pretty simple.

So having said that, is there any threat that Twitter will one day be yet another vehicle to be owned by the marketers? I think right now Twitter is in a bit of an “Age of Innocence”, it is becoming incredibly popular, and it is an interface to conversations you would not normally be a participant of. I can tweet with Telecom New Zealand (@telecomnz) and Vodafone (@vodafonenz), and if I am having a problem with a product or service they are most helpful, due credit to both. They respond with genuine interest but still in a casual Twitter way. To be honest this beats calling their call centres hands down. But then 20 years ago, if you emailed both someone within would have responded the same, with personal interest and enthusiasm because they probably only got one email from a customer each day, and it made a pleasant change. Will it be different when they have to respond to 5 tweets a second? Is the “We have received your tweet and will respond within 1 working day” message inevitable one day?

Today you can follow your favourite celebs, and tweet with them. You can quite often even get personal replies from them too. Is it the fan mail of the new century? Stephen Fry @stephenfry has a whopping 52,000 follows, and he is in the top ten twitterers worldwide (by follower numbers) so you may not get a personal response from him, but he does write his own tweets. But when Twitter reaches critical mass will it be harder to participate in conversations with these people, and will they be less genuine?

It will be fascinating to watch what happenes over the next 24 months, and to watch as different market segments adopt Twitter. Will it be the beginning of the end when after a TV news article, they invite you to “talk back” on their twitter address? Will print advertising invite people to follow products on Twitter? Will it be good or bad? At the end of the day, I feel it will be the Twitter users who will decide.

Today I get my news headlines through twitter, I follow interesting celebs, I get information about new product releases (not sales pitches) from companies I am interested in, I get blog feeds and finally, the random thoughts of many many different people (but mostly technology geeks). All my choice. My Twitter motivation is to connect with like minded people, and have genuine interesting conversations with them. As soon as the conversations stop being genuine and interesting I may turn them off. But right now, Twitter is the wild west/new frontier phase. No rules, no barriers, and find your own way.

So what are your Twitter motivations? If you don’t currently tweet, what would (or wouldn’t) you use Twitter for?

3D Flash Saves the Planet

Here is a really cool and engaging flash application that really shows off the great new 3D rendering capabilities of Macromedia Adobe Flash.

Explore the tree and learn about its happy friends and how they make a difference in saving the planet. Be sure to pan and scroll around with your mouse, especially when reading each of the character’s pop-up book. A lot of time and energy must have really gone into this project and it is absolutely magic!

Eco Zoo

The 3D engine in Flash opens a new world of opportunities for the future of Flash. I have been critical of the lack of true 3D support in the past, but I guess the day has finally arrived where the majority of computers are sufficiently capable of supporting a rendering engine that is fast, and eye-catchingly beautiful enough to carry it off. This is really what the Flash client is all about, shazam!

Check out http://ecodazoo.com/

Search Engine Marketing for Dummies

“how do I get my site at the top of the Google search results?” A very popular question that I come across a lot, and something every website owner wants to achieve. Well the good news is that if you follow some pretty basic rules and tips, the search engines will smile upon both you and your site, and you will have great success. Here they are:

Tip #1 – Understand why people will want to visit

The first tip is really about understanding your audience. Yep, good old fashioned marketing! You must first understand why your customers will want to come to your site. Of course, there will be some very good reasons, and these will be your products, services and the information your website provides about them. By understanding what your customers are looking for, you are better able to explain how your company will fulfil their needs.

This seems obvious huh? In fact this is not really anything specific to search engine marketing, it is more about good marketing. And so if you understand your customers well enough, this will be reflected as clear effective communication of what value you provide to them, your customers, in your website. This is important not just because clear communication is good communication, but because from this will come your most important piece of market intelligence, the best keywords to use for your search engine marketing.

Getting your keywords right is one of the most important achievements you can make on the journey to effective search engine marketing.

Bob owns a cheese company that makes a variety of delicious cheeses. At Bob’s Cheese they have just launched their new on-line shop for premium cheeses at direct to market discounted prices. They have a brain storming session for keywords and decide that one of their key phrases for on-line search engine marketing is “delicious Gruyère on-line”.

Now their cheese may in fact be delicious, and selling it on-line is indeed a bonus, but in reality most people can’t spell Gruyère and more often than not their target audience is actually looking for “discount premium cheese”. But how do they work this out?

There is a number of ways to work out the best keywords for your site. You and (if you are fortunate enough) your marketing team, are the most qualified people to figure that out. Think about your market and how they think. Here is a sure-fire way to get some good ideas on keywords if you get stuck;

Get together a group of people who represent a good sample of your target audience. Get a broad spread of people, from computer literate to first time Googlers if you can (if they still exist). Give them a simple task. Explain a product or service (without explicitly suggesting YOURS) and get them to imagine they are looking for it online. One by one get them to bring up a search engine and then watch. See what they do and what they search on. Take note of all the words and phrases used and the success the people had with each. At the end, ask them why they searched on the words they did. You may be surprised at the terminology and phrases they search on and their explanations why, but out of this exercise you should find some patterns, and a common set of words used. These will become your keywords.

Tip #2 – Use your keywords and phrases throughout your site

This is the most common approach to search engine marketing. Search engines actually “read” your pages, and so if you use a lot of keywords in the pages that people search on then the more relevant your website will appear. The more the search engines think your site is relevant, the higher in the search results you go.

Build up a collection of well thought out and relevant keywords (as per tip #1), and be sure your website talks about them. Don’t come up with too many keyword phrases, as you will need to use them all consistently throughout the content of your website. So work out your best phrases and keywords, and incorporate them into your site. Not only will this give you better chances of search engine success, but it will generally keep your website “on message”.

If you succeed in getting visitors to your site with one particular set of keywords, but your site uses different terminology or uses the keywords out of context in the page content, the visitor who found you in the search will end up getting confused and click the back button to the Google search results. This is referred to as a “bounce”, and search engines pick up on this. The more visitors bounce back from your site with a particular set of keywords, then the search engines will rank your site lower.

Tip #3 – Use your keywords not only in the page content, but in the title and URLs of your website

This step requires you to carefully design the names of the pages in your site to reflect the subject matter they are about. Search engines give you “points” for using keywords in the content of your pages, but more weight to keywords that appear in the name (URL) and title of a page. So as an example, our cheese company has just created some new pages promoting their on-line premium cheese shop. By using their primary keywords of “discount premium cheese”, they could name the page that talks about this service something like:

http://www.bobscheese.com/discount-premium-cheese.html

This would work better than say:

http://www.bobscheese.com/index2.html

which says absolutely nothing about what the page is about.

The page should have the title (that appears in the top of the visitors web browser) of “Discount premium cheese” and by using this phrase in the words on the page itself, they would score valuable points with a search engine. A search engine will understand that the page itself is something to do with “Discount premium cheese”.

To go one step further, our cheese shop could include their main keywords in the base website address itself. So instead of using the web address of:

http://www.bobscheese.com

they could register and use

http://www.discountpremiumcheese.com

So the full address to the page would become

http://www.discountpremiumcheese.com/discount-premium-cheese.html

Now not only do the keywords appear in the text of the pages, the title of the page, the name of the page itself, but they are also in the actual website address for the website.

This step may not be practical for some people as their website URL is probably part of their existing brand, and existing website. However in the case of our fictitious cheese shop, they could register a new URL of discountpremiumcheese.com and use this alongside bobscheese.com for their on-line store only, keeping bobscheese.com as their corporate website. They could then link to the new www.discountpremiumcheese.com from the home page of www.bobscheese.com and actually get rewarded for this (see tip #4 below).

This is a good tip to consider if you are starting out a new website, but with some clever thinking you could break off some of your exisitng website content under this new URL if that makes sense for what you are doing, like Bob setting up his new online shop.

Tip #4 – Get other sites to link to your site using your keywords

This is a well known approach to raising the profile of your site and raising the relevance of your website in search engines. The more links there are that point to your site, the better as far as search engines are concerned. Search engines use a technique called “spidering”, or “crawling”. This is where a little search engine software robot called a spider (on the world wide web you see) starts reading a web page. In the page it finds a link to another page or website. The search engine doing the spidering, upon finding a link then sends off another little electronic spider to follow it to find out where it goes. That spider finds more links in these pages, and sends off more spiders. The more links the spiders find, the bigger the army of spiders becomes, and while this army crawls around the web, the more it comes across links to your website from others, and each time the more “points” it gives your site. If lots of sites talk about your site, the more popular it must be, so the more relevant it becomes.

It is vitally important to have your site linked to from other sites, both for search engines and so real people can find your site, but one big mistake most people make is to not get the other sites to use keywords in the link text itself. The search engine spiders may not necessarily understand why another site links to your site. It will just find a link and think “oh here is a link, I will follow it.” But by using keywords in the link text itself, the spider can understand the link in context and understand what the link is about.

If Bob’s Cheese can get other sites to link to his site using good keywords then the search engines will associate these keywords with bob’s site. So a link like click here for premium discount cheese would give the search engine better context than just visit Bob’s Cheese. By doing this the search engine gets the idea that the link has something to do with premium discount cheese, and so associates these keywords with Bob’s site. The more sites with links like this pointing to Bob’s site the more the search engine thinks that Bob’s site is an authority on premium discount cheese.

Wrap up

So that’s it for now. Four simple tips to search engine success. There are, as always, plenty of other things you can do, but these four things will give you the most value. No voodoo or black magic is required to get your site up in the search engine rankings, just some sensible steps and a bit of time and effort, and you will get great results.

Lastly if you want instant traffic to your site then have a look at a paid advertising campaign using Google’s Adwords. You still need to work out your keywords and get your website content right, but Adwords will give you that instant traffic you desire… but more on this another time

Internet name suppression

It is amazing how anyone can think you can suppress anything on the Internet that is in the public domain, astounding. I am referring to Judge David Harvey who has put an Internet only suppression on naming the two murder suspects in relation to the murder of Weymouth 14-year-old John Hapeta, but TV and print is okay.

I think the idea being so people could not google them and be prejudiced prior to the trial perhaps?. What? The media are reporting only what is plainly public domain, like the fact they are accused of the murder of John Hapeta. Anything else someone is likely to find about the two men is already there. Will this stop people blogging about the trial? No. Will it stop people talking about it? No. Will it stop people thinking about it? No.

Now correct me if I am wrong, but are we entitled to free speech still? I can respect name suppression in general, and understand its importance, but is this a little half-arsed? By last count, I have found atleast 10 posts online already naming the men, plus stuff.co.nz is already openly naming them online (UPDATE: this only lasted a couple of hours, and they have now removed the names from the article). Once you have one you might as well have 100,000. It is near impossible to police and to stop. The Internet has a memory and does not forget. In fact the more you try and conceal something online, the more prolific it becomes, why? Just because people don’t like to be told not to do something, or think something.

So why did Judge David Harvey pick this case? I am not sure. It is no more high profile than any other case at the moment or in recent history. It is not Internet related. Perhaps it is because these fellows have fairly uncommon names and would be easily googled? Well the only posts online I found about either were the above posts and articles naming them in connection with the murder. Is it to test the waters a little? The media were all taken aback by this one. Perhaps Judge David Harvey, trying to establish a precedent, was slipping this one through?

Seriously, I can’t for a moment think that Judge David Harvey is a fool, in fact I suspect he is quite smart and he is very aware of what will come out of this, people will post online the details, the media will challenge him, and there will be a good deal of discussion over the idea of suppression on the Internet of case details and accused identities.

Perhaps there are one or more points being made here. Here is one.

Does new media creates challenges for a legal system that is built on some basic premises, one being you will be judged by a jury with a relatively unbiased point of view. Once upon a time you picked from the “peers” of the accused a jury, stuck them in a room and they deliberated, went home, perhaps caught the six-o-clock news, and read some stuff about the case in the paper, went back to court and deliberated some more. Today a juror can google anything. They can find the accused on Facebook, Bebo, MySpace, LinkedIn. They can read blogs about the accused, and the case itself. They can do this from their computer, or their mobile phone, from home, the court, on the way to the court. There are no rules about what you and I can write about online, and if you do think someone is guilty and have a strong opinion you have every right to say so, don’t you? It’s your opinion. It may be unqualified, but it is your opinion and your right. But could this influence the opinion of that juror? Is that okay? Is that part of being someone’s “peer” in today’s society? “Geesh, everyone blogging about the case thinks he is guilty, so he must be”. Can the Internet find someone guilty?

I don’t think this will stick and lawyers from the Herald and Fairfax will get involved, but it sure is getting the media thinking and talking about it, which I am guessing was Judge David Harvey’s goal. It may have been a bit extreme, but I am guessing he has one or two important points to make and they will come out when “the media” challenges it.

AIR, Flex, Ajax – How to tell what is better

I was asked the other day to provide my expert opinion (expert = someone who has written at least 2 lines of code before) on Apollo (now released as AIR) from Adobe and how it compares to Ajax , which to be honest I had to admit to at the time I had heard nothing about AIR. But I did some digging…

Quiz. Which is a better web:

a) Adobe AIR (Apollo)
b) Flex
c) Ajax
d) other

I didn’t have to dig long as there was a bit of hype out on the wires already about the developer release of AIR. However my first Google on it provided great insight into air con. After Googling a bit longer I found it at Adobe. Now I have a rule of thumb when it comes to dealing with the hype surrounding new software and frameworks, which is; I tend to back the spin free an non commercially hyped solution when it is there and robust enough to do the job. When I get into these debates I am often painted as the mac loving, open office jiving, eclipse coding open source lover I am. But I will be up front on this one, I would back independent Ajax tools over AIR, and here is why.

It appears there is a groundswell of support for Adobe’s line of web software, Flex and now Apollo. Flex is the gui you wished your web page always had when writing online software. As it blends in the best of flash you can clearly leverage of all of the flashy goodness such as tweening, smooth frame rates, video, audio, and so on. Flex packages up flash with common UI elements and makes the business of server client comms really easy. With all this “right” it does not make the “whats wrong” list is hard to forget. Here is a run down on the the three options, Flex, Apollo (AIR), and Ajax.

Flex

There is lots right with Flex, it is easy to use and develop in once you are up to speed. What’s wrong with Flex. It is a plug in. And that’s really it. It does not rely on the core functionality of your web browser, instead you need to download and install (and update) a client side application which is the Flash player. So considering you are sticking a plugin into a webpage you are not enhancing someone’s web experience, instead you are replacing it with a non-web based experience, where web = html and a web browser. In this new window within the browser page there is no guarantee that the experience will be consistent with how a user sees web pages. For example the back button doesn’t work like it should without breaking down and hacking your flash app to cope. The UI elements are non-os level elements which means they don’t work the same and follow the usual conventions without a lot of work (scrolling with the mouse wheel, cut and paste). There are no hyper links in the traditional sense, and google can’t easily index the pages. Now I have bee developing in Flash for the last 7 years and I agree you can overcome most of the above objections with tricks and knowhow, but it isn’t easy and Flash is supposed to be easy.

Flex has the power to re-invent the web browser, within the web browser which is a problem. Web browsers are written by people who know what they are doing, and you can’t say that about every Flex and Flash developer.

Pros: Cool, an easy framework to use once you are up to speed, supported
Cons: Reinvents perfectly good software, invents new UI conventions, doesn’t work like a web page should

AIR (formally Apollo)

This one does look interesting, I admit. Apollo (dammit AIR) is trying to get around all the issues and conflicts of having an application within another application that putting flex/flash in a browser creates. However they are now trying to slove the problem by taking the web browser out of the loop. To try AIR I had to install the AIR client first, then when I came across an AIR app online, I had to download it, then install it too.

The benefits of AIR are there for sure, off-line saving of content, a more integrated library of OS level tools (file uploads, access to web cams, address books), the layering of rich content over other existing web content. These are all really fantastic and welcome, but here is the rub. They are taking the web browser out of the loop to do it. AIR is really just a cross platform desktop widget maker.

I would say Adobe are making a 10 year investment into AIR in order to take it where they want to take it. As a cross platform widget creator it has a limited life. Agreed that at the time of writing the AIR demos I played with looked like they had been knocked together in 5 minutes so I will keep looking for better things to come.

Pros: Cross platform widget maker, nice OS level integration to other apps
Cons: Yet another install (x2), not a web experience – you run applications, too new

Ajax (with your choice of framework)

Now like all good reviewers, I have saved my preferred option till last. Ajax is a fairly standard concept these days and there are plenty of powerful Ajax libraries around like prototype and an extension of it , script.aculo.us and it is common place in web application frameworks all round. Ajax is a concept, it is not (un)necessarily software and this is where my comparison gets a little askew. However the point I want to make is this. Ajax lets you do the majority of what Flex and AIR (will) let you do and It uses the power of the web browser to do it. You don’t need to install anything, users have all they need in their web browser to use it. Ajax leverage’s off of xhtml and other industry norms (ehem) to provide a unified web experience. Where it falls short is where it needs to perform non-web specific tasks, like animation, video, and audio. A good Ajax app degrades gracefully also, which means in the worst case scenario a visitor can still click and submit forms. And that is all I really need to say about Ajax. It is a simple consistent set of libraries that don’t break the web paradigm (too much). Flex and AIR don’t just break the paradigm, they smash it and jump up and down on the pieces.

Sometimes paradigms need to be broken. But a user browsing a webpage is no looking for a new paradigm. They are looking for a web site that works consistently.

Now that I have that out of the way, there is one important flaw in my comparisons that I must point out. Flex, AIR and Ajax are all different things. They are not all apples. Flex is a Framework that uses HTML, Javascript and Flash. AIR is a desktop application that pretends (almost convincingly) to be a web browser. Ajax is an idea and a simple set of libraries to back it up. And anyone who knows me knows that I like simple.

A better web experience is all about providing a consistent web experience, and “web” to me means web based protocols and languages like HTTP, XHTML, Javascript and URLs. One day Flash will be donated to the community by Adobe and then it may become a standard feature of a web browsers user experience, but while the choice is between using standard browser based features enhanced with Javascript and clever community created libraries and using a commercial software tool that “plugs in” and/or replaces the web browser, well I will have to back the knowledge, and passion of the community over Adobe’s new tools.