Using personal analytics to create a better user experience will help you gain insight into your business and your customers (thus increasing revenue). Ankur Shah (from Techlightenment) used the example of the village bakery in the 1970s - the baker knew what you liked and could make recommendations on what to try based on knowing what you chose for years in the past.

On the web we’ve traditionally asked users for information via long registration forms (which are boring for the user), but there is a lot of information available without having to ask. Amazon.com recommends books and products based upon on what you’ve chosen in the past and what others have chosen is similar to the village bakery. These types of recommendations are part of the implicit web and are valuable for both the user (who sees more things that may be of interest) and to the website (who can sell more books).

Think about every interaction on your website as data about your users which should be treated as content. When your users click on a link, when they signup for an enewsletter, and when they come in from a a search engine, they are giving you valuable information that you can use to enhance their experience. One of the most basic enhancements would be to acknowledge users who come in from search engines with the keywords they came in with and give them relevant links from all over your site.

Obviously there are some fairly large privacy issues with using personal data, but if you are upfront with what you are doing and are providing a valuable service, people will be willing to share their information in exchange (just make sure you are providing valuable, relevant services in return).

Technorati Tags: web2expo, analytics, personal analytics

Kakul Srivatava from Flickr spoke about how tagging is evolving. Tagging started as a way to find things or to play with friends and family. Then additional meaningfulness was found from community tagging - things the author would not have thought to mention. Inferred tags used in clustering, hot tags, places, etc. can show you what is important at a point in time.

What’s next?

• More Metadata - using subtags (people, regions, etc), machine tags, “suggest” tags, “correct” tags, “play” tags to merge data sets and get new connections and meanging.
• More Network Magic - is this interesting? is this related? is this a story? is this news? To find more information and new relevancy.
• Greatest Challenge - all this data requires more and more screen space so how do you make it available and useful?

Using tagging on your business website can help your readers find more relevant content on your site, which increases their length of stay (and the opportunity to brand and/or sell to them).

Technorati Tags: web2expo, tagging, flickr,

The wave of tech information is starting to drag me under. So many great web solutions to problems that businesses have. As the last day of the conference, I’m starting to reach critical mass.

Yesterday I watched two internet titans decide to embrace open, user friendly web platforms for us mortals. This could be exciting for our business web developer community.

In their keynote, Yahoo! announced a Herculean task to re-wire every part of their platform to open up access to outside applications. Starting with the recent announcement of Search Monkey, Yahoo! is making bold moves to bring web developers into their house and offer them warm cookies and fresh milk. Their idea is to make their web properties sticky, keeping people on Yahoo’s network though stealth because the interconnections made though 3rd party web apps will drive them back in. Thats not as sneaky as it sounds, many many web application platforms work in the same way (Facebook is natorious for its locked-in platform for web applications). The appeal to web app developers like me is the potential for huge, fire hose style traffic curves coupled with some of Yahoo’s cooler properties like Flickr, Mail, Search and Finance. This won’t happen overnight, but if Yahoo can keep its focus though all the distractions, then they have a real chance at stealing the hearts and minds of some influential developers. Those developers may just change the web.

Later that same day, Google took the mic in the big hall to discuss Google Apps Engine. The company line here is that Google wants to “help the internet scale” by opening up access to its massively scaled data hosting platform. That’s a cute little sound bite, but I personally suspect it has more to do with the decision to monetize spare computing power, a decision Amazon had years ago Google’s offering goes a bit further than Amazon, building out every aspect of the stack to allow web sites and web apps to use Google to host up their online ideas. Once you get past the initial ‘I can have my little web site running on Google’ daydream fantasy, you see that there are some severe limitations as of today. Apps need to be written in Python, which may be a hurdle for some. They need to interact with Big Table, Google’s unique persistence layer. Big Table is not a relational database, so you really need to rethink how you interact with your data. Outbound web interactions are limited to 1MB transfers per connection and http calls only for outside web services. The service is free today for beta but expect that to change in the future. These limitations aside, you cannot deny that when Google sets a path for the future, it draws a considerable crowd of followers (some may say sheep) If Google can make this app engine viable, they may have once again changed the web as well.

Technorati Tags: web2expo, google, yahoo, web development

In his talk, Maximizing Ad Revenue Through Format Optimization, Paul Edmondson from YieldBuild shared their data on how to change the advertising on your website in order to increase revenue. With so much advertising on the web, the audience has become increasingly blind to ads, which drops their click-through-rates (CTR) and revenue. However, very subtle changes to the ads on your website will prevent a dip in revenue (if you measure performance).

There are four pillars of ad optimization:

• Ad Size - Size matters. 728×90 (leaderboard), 300×250 (medium box) and 160×600 (wide skyscraper) are the most effective ad sizes (with the most clicks). Different ad networks have different rates of success of selling clicks for certain ad sizes, so be aware of that when choosing one.
• Format attributes - such as rounded corners, background colors, borders, font colors, etc. Grey background with little border works best. Try testing variations on link colors, font colors, highlight colors, of your website.
• Placement - Design your site to accept the best ad sizes (see above) to make every ad account. Don’t underestimate below-the-fold value. A 300×250 ad placed in the center of the content will get better click-throughs than skyscrapers above-the-fold. For your title bar, ads aligned to the right perform best.
• Ad Network - Choose the right ad network for your blog or website. Look for ad networks which allow geo-targeting to match ads to your audience. If ads served on your site don’t seem to match your content, try a different network.

For smaller websites who would like to try to monetize their content, try placing one great ad unit in a prominent position for a high-value return. Overall, keep in mind that more ads are not better and not only are they decreasing value on your site, they may be slowing down the load time of your site, which will eventually deter your readers (and then your ad revenue will decrease with less traffic).

Technorati Tags: web2expo, ads, ad revenue, B2B

Stamen is the classic “position player” of the web app industry. They do really great work but are rarely singled out for it. Stamen’s job is to make other companies better. They’re mostly known for those really cool flash data mashups available at Digg Labs

Michal Migurski discussed some of the things they learned from Digg when designing the Labs API. Here are some highlights

• Do dates as UNIX timestamp - There is a deep religious philosophy surrounding this kernel of wisdom, but at its center timestamps are just best practice. If you aren’t a unix acolyte, UNIX timestamps are seconds since Jan 1st 1970 (called epoch in some circles). This arbitrarily decided date format is the universal solvent that cleans up all date messes. Trust us, just use it.
• Stick to core formats like XML & JSON. He also mentioned Serialized PHP and Javascript callbacks which are gaining in popularity
• Unit tests are the single best way to coordinate design and development - One of the stories he told about working with the Digg community was that as designers they had a hard time syncing with the programmers at Digg. Unit Tests were the best way to make sure that what Stamen was designing would work on what Digg was writing in their API. If you don’t know what Unit Tests are, start with the wiki page on it
• Expect your database to change - APIs that need to talk to the database (and really, what API doesn’t) will need to be updated as often as the database changes. DB changes can happen quickly at a client company like Digg who is thinking up new features in the wild. That can make for a tough, moving target to hit.
• If you defer a feature at launch it’ll take forever to get to it - This is more of a truism than any great pearl of wisdom, at least to an experienced developer. Once code “ships” you rarely ever have the luxury to revisit missing pieces. The logic goes that if it wasn’t important enough to hold up the launch, then its likely not important enough to hold up the next launch either. At Digg the missing part is the Writable API I believe, though it was hard to hear near the end of the session

Technorati Tags: web2expo, stamen, api, digg, twitter, B2B

Twitter and Digg Labs (represented by Alex Payne and Michal Migurski, respectively) have some experience with API’s. You could say they are war hardened.

Their talk was a well intentioned, if a bit sanitized, version of the experiences they each had in implementing their Application Programming Interfaces. Alex was first, balancing his short talk with what worked and what did not. Here are some of the highlights;

• Let is grow organically - This makes sense for a startup that doesn’t really expect to be the next big thing, though later on in his talk he contradicted this advice in the what-not-to-do section
• Document - This ones a best practice that is both always mentioned and almost always ignored. API’s though kinda live and die on their documentation.
• Support API community - They used the Google Groups app to build up the community.
  Scale from the API perspective - this is where organic doesn’t work. The deal is that if you don’t take the time to think through issues ahead of time, these issues will bite you in the ass.
• Security issues - If users can think about a way to misuse your api, they will. Twitter users would get around caching schemes, rate limiting schemes and attributes in your data model will leak. Good cross domain not xml policy would help.

What mistakes they made

• Didn’t start with api.twitter.com - Now all the twitter traffic intermingles, both api and http. The separation by domain is a good thing to do up front. This will be happening soon, according to Alex
• Didn’t version API from the get-go - Here they found that growing organiclly meant that versioning wasn’t needed. Now, however, versions for depreciation is really a must have. It will be part of the domain move.
• Didn’t make life easier for flash developers - Applications need visual people to be created. This was an eye-opener. Programmers admitting that they need someone else?? The skills of the Flash Developer, traditionally mocked by the programming elite, is really an important part of API tool design. The community that captures flash programmers will have cool looking tools
• Didn’t automate to make life easier for us - Administrative view of active API customers, stats, and admin views isn’t real sexy code work. But is you go forward with your API without these views of how users are using your api, you’re going to be in the dark when tough questions start being asked of your company.

I will cover the second half of this presentation, Michal’s talk on Digg Labs, in a second post.

Technorati Tags: web2expo, api, digg, twitter, B2B

So you think you should add a social network or blog to your business website. What planning should you do to make this an effective undertaking and one with measurable ROI? Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff from Forrester Research presented a simple strategy from their book Groundswell: POST.

• P - People - Access your customer’s social activities. There are different roles people play on your website/community (from Forrester’s social technographics ladder): creators, critics, collectors, joiners, spectators, and inactives.
• O - Objectives - Decide what you want to accomplish. Different departments in your company will probably have different objectives (research - listening, marketing - talking, sales - energizing, support - supporting, development - embracing).
• S - Strategy - Plan for how relationships with customers will change.
• T - Technology - Decide which social technologies to use. Since you know the objectives these will be measurable.

To create a successful community you’ll need to engage your audience by creating a place they want/need to go regularly - asking them questions, listen to their ideas, create a place they can get advice and help each other. Start with your customers, choose objectives you can measure, line up front-office backing, get the naysayers on your side, and start small, but think big. Adding community to your business website can help you understand your customers and improve your products and services to increase sales.

Technorati Tags: web2expo, community, social networks

Despite what TechCrunch may have said about Blaine Cook, his talk today on Real Time Web wasn’t delivered from under a rock.

He talked with the Web 2.0 expo crowd about how HTTP refreshing isn’t the right protocol for applications that use messaging, such as Twitter. His take is that the best messaging service out there, one that is open, free, web ready, standards based, easy to use, all these thing in one is the Jabber protocol

Jabber’s event driven messaging means that a service like twitter doesn’t have to constantly poll on status of customers when usually the result is ‘nothing new’ Event driven messaging like Jabber allows the service to ‘ping’ the Twitter service to say ‘hey, Im back’ or ‘Hey, I have a message’ Following this on, this means that the Twitter service to then send on that message to you, the subscriber once and only once when its fresh. Jabber is Client-Server not p2p, which is applicable here.

The use of jabber in Twitter makes perfect sense. What you can learn from Blaine’s experience is still a bit muddy, however. Twitter has known scalability issues, but how much of those were HTTP/Jabber problems? We just don’t know. The reality is that for the B2B business, you will likely never face their kind of subscription traffic issues. That means that Jabber should be looked at for the right projects that needs Presence, Subscription, and Messaging. It is XML and looks very much like email in its design. Look at Jabber as a choice for your Web Messaging needs.

Oh, he also laid the gauntlet by saying RSS is good for basic content subscription, but APIs should use ATOM due to parsing being cleaner. Evangelists are still liking RSS, so this was an interesting reveal.

Technorati Tags: web2expo, real time web, B2B

Just finished my first Workshop at the web2.0 Expo

This will be a quick and dirty post between sessions (and while eating a sandwich)

Web 2.0 Best Practices, authored by Niall Kennedy

Niall’s talk focused on taking the audience though the stages of web development history in order to lay down a path for the future. No matter where your web site is today, the take home from Niall is that you have homework to do. If you have a site that doesn’t have RSS distributing your content out in feeds, you need to start here. If you already have that part in place, your next hurdle is adopting microformats

Microformats is the landing pad for preparing your website for the new semantic movement, likely to be the 3.0 of web 3.0 Microformats lets you tell search engines what your content is meant to be. hCard, hCal, and hReference are all reference implementations of microformats. Using them will improve your search engine results, this is now really now debated much.

Once your site is using Microformats, it is time to extend that content out to large platforms like Google, Facebook, MySpace and others. Widgets allow you to put your content up on sites like Facebook to use their traffic to extend your content’s reach. This is usually done through proxies; your content is updated on their site only as often as your site wants. This limits your traffic burden.

Niall did a very good job with this workshop. It was compelling to see how the decisions of the past can make educated guesses on where we are going in the future. If he’s right, this really isn’t the time to sit on your latest site redesign. If you get out infront of this microformat movement and widget revolution, you can beat your competition to the punch to getting those valuable eyeballs that drive sales in an online world

Technorati Tags: web2expo, microformats, B2B

We’ll be at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco this week - planning on blogging from there, but today is a travel day.

Shoot me an email if you’ll be there and would like to meet up.