Just noticed yesterday that Google chanced the favicon for their search, AdSense and analytics sites to a small g (from the large G it used to be). Google AdWords seems to be still using the large G. A re-branding effort? Or perhaps differentiating paid products from others?

More coverage here and here.

Technorati Tags: google, favicon, search, analytics, adwords, adsense

Here are some more technical questions that didn’t make it into the profile interview James Lindenbaum, CEO of Heroku

Sazbean: Will you be supporting DNS redirects for users who want to use their domain instead of heroku.com?

James: That’s already available. You can add your own custom DNS at any time. There are a bunch of applications that are hosted right now, where you can’t tell at all that they have anything to do with Heroku.

Continue Reading »

I got the change to talk with James Lindenbaum, CEO of Heroku. Heroku is looking to eliminate all the reasons companies have for not doing software projects. This interview comes at an interesting time; companies are finding it difficult to justify spending money on software projects that have any risk associated with them (which are all projects, frankly). Heroku is here to remind those companies that when the barriers are low, so are the risks. James was kind enough to take a few minutes for this interview right before getting on a plane for RailsConf. I want to thank him again for that. Continue Reading »

No subject is more controversial to a group of web professionals than Web Statistics. The advertising industry is still a little sore with us after we promised early on that Web Stats would give them all that invaluable information they could never get from TV, Radio or Print. This was not a lie, per se, as some sectors are able to mine tremendous amounts of quality information from their web traffic, session login, and cookie data. For most of us, however, the reality has fallen far short of the promise. Continue Reading »

Google IO is two-days of in-depth tech sessions on how to build the next generation of web applications. To get updates of what is going on: Tech Crunch is live blogging, there is a twitter feed (googleio) and a back channel (irc://irc.freenode.net/googleio).

Once you understand the different types of online ads and the advantages and disadvantages of rich media ads, it is important to know how to measure the effectiveness of these ads (especially since you’re probably paying a premium for their creation).

Just like display ads, these metrics are important:

• Impressions: How many times is the ad served to a person (or as near as can be estimated). Impressions to search engine crawlers and bots should be filtered out (most ad servers do this automatically).
• Clicks: How many times someone clicked on the ad (and was taken to your website - remember to target the landing page). This should also filter out search engine crawlers and bots.
• Click-through rate (CTR): The number of clicks divided by the number of impressions multiplied by 100 for a percentage. This number will typically be pretty small. CTR of 3% is very good for rich media ads, but will quickly decrease the longer the ad is left on a website. Many CTR will be under 1%. This is an indicator of how effective the ads is or how many times the ad was seen each time before it was clicked on.

Unique to rich media ads, this metric is also important:

• Interaction time: Or an average of how long people interacted with the ad (clicked on it, moused over the ad, played the video, etc.). How long this time is will depend on what interaction the ad has in it. If it is just a mouse-over that displays more text the interaction time will be much less than an ad which contains a game (usually).

Since rich media ads are usually more expensive to produce and place on a website, measuring their effectiveness is extremely important to reaching the goals and return on investment (ROI) you have for the ad. Most ad servers will have the first three metrics. The third is becoming more available, but usually requires additional programming into the ad for proper tracking.

Technorati Tags: advertising, ads, rich media ads, online advertising

As discussed in Types of Online Advertising, rich media ads with which viewers can interact and may contain animation, audio and video. Rich media ads can be powerful way to convey your message, but these types of ads have some advantages and disadvantages:

Advantages

• Communicate more information - through different types of media (audio, video, interaction). Rich media ads can have video, audio, animation and even small applications or games.
• Collect more information - either by programming in more sophisticated analytics or simply by asking for information.
• More clicks - As annoying as these ads are, they are more likely to be clicked on because they catch people’s attention (please follow IAB guidelines), at least during the first week or so.
• Powerful branding - Even if the ad isn’t clicked on, viewers are still more likely to see and remember the ad than traditional display advertising.

Disadvantages

• May slow down a website - These ads tend to be larger in file size, which takes longer to download. Even with faster Internet connections being more prevalent, you should be aware of your audience and how many are on slower connections. Even with faster Internet connections, an overly large file or many rich media ads can still slow down a website. If your website is too slow, people will just go elsewhere.
• May annoy - Since these ads tend to be more visible to viewers, they also can quickly become more annoying. So stick with the IAB guidelines and place ads for short time periods (no longer than a month) to maximize the effectiveness of the ad.
• More expensive - They are more difficult to create and require a higher skillset. These types of ads are usually more expensive to place on a website as well (because of the larger file size and annoyance factor).
• May be blocked - Although most people have the software installed necessary to view these ads, it is fairly easy to turn off this option in most browsers and in some ad blocking software. However, as more websites use the same technology to increase their interaction and functionality, viewers are less likely to block the ads.

If you are aware of these advantages and disadvantages, you can make an informed decision about purchasing these types of ads (or allowing them to be displayed on your website or blog).

Technorati Tags: advertising, ads, rich media ads, online advertising

Yes, it was called Apollo at one time. Considering how many people re-reference AIR as Apollo in conversation, Adobe should stick with their first marketing idea in the future.

Adobe AIR is the new runtime desktop environment that has the kids in Silicon Valley all excited. Here are some sample apps for reference. According to Mark Blair, Adobe’s Pacific technical director, the idea behind AIR is this: online apps offline, platform independent, everywhere

It makes some sense, since so much development effort is being put into online applications, that you be able to tap into those apps on the desktop. In this way, AIR applications become non-browser dependent interfaces to big online applications like eBay, Amazon and others. Google and Microsoft are both thinking along the same lines (though at entirely different levels) with Google Gears and Silverlight. Gears is a low level persistence layer that syncs your online gmail, Calender [As noted in the comments, I should have said Reader and Docs ~aaron] and others with offline surrogates. Silverlight is aiming more directly at Adobe Flash/Flex and has only recently made noise about a desktop controls component. This late game hesitation on the part of Microsoft is understandable given their already commanding position on the desktop with .Net Really, for my money AIR’s largest technological competitor is JavaFX. Both are platform independent, VM based technologies. Until Microsoft’s Silverlight 2.0 comes calling, this space is Adobe’s to loose. Adobe has both a head start over Sun and a laser beam focus on their product’s polish which Sun typically lacks. If you have a web application and your customers are demanding UI options beyond the browser, take a look at AIR

Interesting technology notes, AIR uses WebKit, SQLite and Tamarin for its web rendering, data storage and ActionScript Virtual Machine respectively. WebKit is the renderer used by Apple’s Safari and native to the iPhone. Tamarin is a very fast ECMAscript VM that supports full runtime error reporting, built-in debugging, and binary socket support. It was donated to Mozilla by Adobe and will be used in SpiderMonkey to speed up its JavaScript support.

Advertising online can increase your brand awareness and promote a product/service. Online advertising has a major advantage over other types of advertising (tv, radio, print) because it is very easy to measure the effectiveness of online campaigns. In a series of posts, I’ll discuss the different types of advertising, their advantages and disadvantages, and how to measure their effectiveness.

There are 3 Main Types of Ads:

• Rich Media: The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) has defined these as “advertisements with which users can interact” and can include video, sound, animation. Ads which just animate but don’t have any interaction are just display ads (see below). Ads should follow IAB guidelines to maximize impact without being overly annoying (which has the opposite effect from what you want). There are many types of rich media ads, including:
  • peel-back
  • floating
  • expanding
  • transitional (interstitial, introstitial, exterstitial)
  • video
  • popup/popunder
• Display Ads: These ads combine text, images, and animation (but are not interactive - those are rich media - see above) to convey a message. Display ads mostly differ in sizes (see IAB for Ad Size Guidelines). Here are some of the most popular sizes:
  • leaderboard (728 x 90 pixels)
  • skyscraper (120 x 600 pixels or 160 x 600 pixels for wide skyscraper)
  • banner (468 x 60 pixels)
  • half-page (300 x 600 pixels)
  • square button (or tile) (125 x 125 pixels)
  • medium rectangle (300 x 250 pixels)
• Text Ads: Text ads are typically just that, text. These ads typically are cheaper, but have the added bonus of usually being searchable by search engines and are less-ignored by readers than some other types of ads. Some of the more common types of text ads:
  • link ads
  • contextual ads
  • search engine marketing ads (pay per click - ex. Google Adwords)
  • online directories

Technorati Tags: advertising, ads, rich media ads, display ads, online advertising

So we talked last week about Adobe Flex, the Rich Internet Application (RIA) stack created by Macromedia and currently owned by Adobe. If you have ever watched a video online from a web 2.0 video site, you have used a Flex application. Sure, Flash and Flex are cousins and the common language they speak is ActionScript, so logically anything you create with Flex can also be created with Flash. But I stand by my assertion that big projects like video libraries are now written in Flex. I can say that with some confidence having worked with a Flex RIA team for over a year now. In doing so, I realized that Flash has some serious limitations that Flex had to overcome.

Testing:

• Flash - Without automated testing, bugs are really very hard to find. Debugging Flash applications is something of an art form.
• Flex - We can add unit testing with FlexUnit to any IDE and have one click testing of our appliations. We also have Stress Tests available

Refactoring:

• Flash - Difficult to do. Flash code bases usually reverted through entropy to an unwieldy mess of bolted on functions that eventually degrades to an unrepairable state.
• Flex - Quoting Adobe ‘Flex Builder 3 [the Eclipse based IDE sold by Adobe] will provide refactoring tools for MXML and ActionScript that are similar to those provide by Eclipse JDT, including Find All References, Move and Rename’.

AIR applications (desktop Flash):

• Flash - You can build AIR applications using Flash CS3, but they will be completely different projects than similar applications for the web.
• Flex - The promise is there for unified code base which can be deployed as a Flex or AIR application. I have not tested this, all though I have heard of some success in this area. Unified code base is difficult. Java has come close, though still there are problems making completely portable code unified. The benefits of having one code base are, however, great.

Multimedia

• Flash - Clearly this is the place where Flash excels, mostly because of its head start. So many multimedia applications have been written in Flash that the ground is well worn.
• Flex - Catching up fast. As I said above, most large multimedia apps today are being written in Flex, mainly because you can embed Flash into a Flex app to get the best of both worlds.

Skilled Help

• Flash - There are many Flash developers out there. Since Flash has been around for a decade now, this is a well established category for consulting, services, and employment. The issue here isn’t the amount but the quality. For anything more than a Flash Banner Ad, I personally recommend a Flash programmer that can handle the complexity. Guru’s such as these are tough to find though. If you have one keep her happy.
• Flex - Since Flex is relatively new, you will have a hard time finding a Flex expert. No matter, really, since what you want is a solid programmer that wants to get into a new area. Programming skills is the real need here since a language is a language. Once you have someone who wants to get their feet wet, exposing them to Flex is not much different than any other new and shiny programming language. We had an ex PHP programmer that became a wunderkind in Flex. All the MXML and ActionScript were just new variants of XML and ECMAscript. Documentation isn’t good yet, but books can be found and examples are aplenty Of course, a good internet consultant can also help you get on track quickly.

Advanced subjects in Flex would deal with the cool microframework Cairngorm which brings Design Patterns like MVC to the table.