Five by Five

This is a bit of a followup to my post in July about ‘Standards still on the horizon’. Given that according to some figures IE6 still commands about 36% of browser market share is it reasonable to stop supporting the browser given such a high percentage of potential users. The answer in my mind was a resounding no - it’s a simple numbers game. However after having read an article yesterday on Sitepoint I’m no longer convinced that argument is so simple.

This article suggests that perhaps a high percentage of traffic that is atributed to IE6 could in fact be bots masquerading as IE6. SPAM and malicious bots could conceivably represent a high volume of traffic on the internet and as such could well be skewing the IE6 browser share. Of course the other numbers still hold true, with corporate users and users unable to upgrade for whatever reason still commanding a high enough percentage of the market to still support the browser.

Food for thought though!

Peter Horan, CEO of Goodmail, thinks so: http://www.imediaconnection.com/content/20178.asp

Given our pioneering role in this area, we’re naturally excited by the possibility of video’s return to the inbox. Back in 2001/2002, we launched Trailermail. With this, we were able to put our clients’ video content into their emails without causing security/blocking issues. Unfortunately ‘progress’ in the form of browser and inbox updates brought an end to Trailermail around 2006.

ISPs are a notoriously tough bunch so, Peter, the best of luck with your negotiations. I salute you!

A bit late to the party on this one, but hey better late than never! bbc.co.uk is one of the most visited sites in the UK and rightly so. It is a virtual treasure trove of information and fun. I have to admit I spend probably more time on it than is good for me, in particular the sports pages! It is also a site that I have long admired because of the fact they have always had clear and defined guidelines in developing and managing content for the site. In short it is a site I’d love to work on more given the opportunity.

Even though they have clear and defined guidelines and have in the past been a shining beacon of web site design, in the age of web 2.0 bbc.co.uk as a whole was becoming a bit stale. However because of the fact so many people visit it I can quite confidently say that most people will have noticed that the site, or more accurately sites, have changed quite a bit this year, and mostly for the better.

Let’s start at the beginning, the BBC homepage. I hope I’m right in saying this was the first part of the site to get an upgrade, and boy what an upgrade. I’m going to put aside for the moment the visual refresh and pick up on that later, instead I am going to focus on the level of customisation the page offers. This page gives you the user the control over what you consider most important, and therefore what you would like to see when you visit the page. Information has been divided up into modules most of which you can add/remove/rearrange to your hearts content. Don’t car about children’s content, remove it, want to see more stories about science and technology add more. In addition to this you can also set you location which is then used by the various modules to offer up more relevant content to you. Set your location to Southampton and you get to see weather in Southampton and news from Hampshire. This is obviously not a new concept and customisable home pages like Netvibes and iGoogle have been around for a number of years, but somehow I feel the BBC have done it in a very clear, usable and under stated way. I have heard some call for the ability to add your own modules, I for one am against this idea and would much prefer the control of what can appear to sit in the BBC’s hands. This kind of functionality is best left for sites which prime focus is such functionality.

OK so back to the visual refresh, the first thing that popped straight out at me is that it is wider. This to me heralds a new age for general web design. For quite a while now we as an agency have in general, although not exclusively, designed our sites for 1024 and above resolutions. That decision though was more a reflection of our target audiences, it has been accepted that in general our users had higher spec machines. There has however always been an argument that by designing for this we are cutting out the experience of a percentage of the audience who have a lower resolution. The BBC’s decision to move to this resolution says to me that the general population (and not just our select audiences) of the UK is browsing at this resolution, and if that’s not a ringing endorsement then I don’t know what is.

On the technical side the site has switched from a table based layout to a strict XHTML semantic mark-up standard. The new design also gives creative’s a far greater degree of flexibility than the old template system. The extra width allows for the use of more white space which is essential in pages where there is a large amount of information to display. Overall its dragged the site into the web 2.0 era.

To complement the new design the BBC have released a visual language guide which is nothing short of superb and spells out concepts and guidelines for design that I have long struggled and failed to put across. Anybody out there who is interested in applying a little science to their creativity should read this guide and indeed many of the public documents that form the guidelines for developing to BBC standards. Quite a benchmark.

So as you can tell I like what the BBC is doing, but are they doing anything wrong? Of course nobody’s perfect My main criticism is that I am having to discover these upgrades myself. If the BBC team happen to write about an update all well and good but I as a user need to discover these upgrades myself or stumble across them. It would be good to have a feed of latest developments, or even better a homepage module that described site upgrades! I recently commented about this on one of the blogs and got pointed at this (non BBC) resource. A good start but I’d prefer something a bit more official. This brings me on to my second criticism which is the amount of time it takes for these upgrades to roll out. The sport site was updated a couple of months ago but there are still many parts of the site which are in the old page style, or has content in the old style dropped into the new template. Surely it can’t be that hard to update them all, but then again I don’t work for the BBC so am no authority on this. Perhaps information on when upgrades are due could be added to a recent upgrades feed?

So the future looks exciting for the BBC sites, we can look forward to more developments to bring all sections of the site in line with the new visual language, DNA anyone? More customisation probably on pages other than the homepage. And hopefully to us as an agency more opportunity to work with the BBC

2008 is looking like a good year for standards, or is it? The browser wars continue to rumble on, Firefox, Opera and Safari all have recent updates which push their standards compliance forward yet another notch. IE continues to lag behind, but has a new browser round the corner with better, if not ground breaking, support. Could development finally be getting easier for us developers? I’d like to think it was, but the sad reality is that even with all these advancements in support it will be a few years yet before we can reap the rewards.

Even though it is two years since IE7 was launched and IE8 will hopefully be released at the back end of this year or early next it doesn’t mean a great deal to the now. IE6 is still around and is likely to be around for some time to come. The simple reason behind this is that IE6 still commands a high percentage of browser share, likely due to corporations who have applications that are dependent on IE6 features and people who are unable to update IE6 for lets say “legal” reasons. The lack of adoption of Vista contributes to this, all of which means that although it is a blot on the browser landscape IE6 will continue to be a thorn in our sides.

It would take a very bold client to ignore such a high percentage of their potential users, especially when one of the users tends to be themselves or their boss. So for all the strides browser vendors are making in standards support, if we cannot reliably use it, the frustration remains! Some people are making tentative steps in the “right” direction, 37 signals, for instance have announced that from August they are dropping full support for IE6 for some of their products. Unfortunately cases such as this are very much in the minority.

So the future still promises to be rosier, but for the moment it’s still a distant dream…

I recently read about updates to the US 2003 CAN-SPAM Act (not legally binding in the UK but nevertheless presents a good package of best practises). Two snippets caught my eye:

• The recipient must not be required to provide anything more than email address and associated opt-out preferences for that email address (i.e., no password, account number, name, etc. can be required)
• The opt-out mechanism must rely on either a reply email or a visit to a single Internet Web page and nothing more (i.e., multiple Web page opt-out processes are no longer allowed).

Now I can immediately think of several brands where hitting the unsubscribe button transports the user to an account login page, steering them to update their preferences to be removed from future mailings. In many ways I’m an advocate. If the customer can control the frequency and type of communication they receive rather than being forced to blanket-unsubscribe, everyone’s a winner. However, new CAN-SPAM definitions throw this practise into doubt. Of course, the reasons for the updates are obvious. As a consumer I can think of nothing more frustrating than trying to unsubscribe only to be confronted with an account login, the details of which I’ve long since forgotten. So what’s the marketer’s solution? Use that single page to maximum benefit. In the first instance, steer the customer to update their preferences. Remind them of the benefits they’re currently receiving. But on the same page, leave a one-click unsubscribe option open too. Properly executed, not only should it be possible to persuade a healthy proportion of customers to remain in the communications programme, but even better they’re providing more data which can be used for better-targetted emails in the future.

Information tagging is not not a new concept and in social media it is very common place. Effective tagging of content can be both tricky and time consuming and in some cases subjective. It is also a real pain to do if you have a lot of content which needs tagging but hasn’t been tagged from the start, unfortunately this blog falls into that category. Clearly there is a problem here which is begging to be solved! And of course it has been solved, well at least there is a service which is attempting to solve the problem.

OpenCalais is a new service offering from Thomas Reuters which in their words:

…automatically creates rich semantic metadata for the content you submit – in well under a second. Using natural language processing, machine learning and other methods, Calais analyzes your document and finds the entities within it…

In simpler terms it analyses your writing and proposes tags which are suitable for the information. This simplifies things for you as you don’t need to think up tags, tags become consistent and overall just easier to apply.

Sounds fantastic, and it is, you just need to be able to integrate the service into your content generation software. This blog is a fine example of content generation software, powered by Wordpress and with a tagging mechanism already built into it. All that is needed is to take the tagging mechanism and integrate it with the OpenCalais service. Step forward Tagaroo, a plug-in available for Wordpress which does exactly this.

With a little technical knowledge I was able to install this plug-in to our blog in under 15 minutes, and bingo, it was up and running. Less than another 15 minutes later I had tagged the last 25 posts that had been written with the help of Tagaroo. Still work to be done of course but the process has been made considerably easier!

Tagaroo doesn’t stop there either, the plugin also takes the suggested tags and performs a search against flickr to suggest images tagged similarly to your content, instant visual context. Ok actually here I didn’t find the images as relevant but I like the feature concept!

Overall a fantastic service and a fantastic plug-in. And of course this post has been tagged with the assistance of Tagaroo.

• OpenCalais
• Tagaroo

Social media is currently big news in, well, social circles. There are now multitudes of sites on the net which are dedicated to the social aspects of the web. There are so many different sites - Facebook, MySpace, Digg, reddit, Twitter, del.cio.us, and many many more - it is hard to know what each site is for and really how useful each one is.

In the web age there is so much information, produced at a staggering rate, on the internet that keeping up is hard. Signal-to-noise ratios make it difficult to know which information is worth your time and which is, simply put, noise. Social media sites can help here, they can act as a kind of filter for the information out there by allowing you to essentially listen to others, be they friends, colleagues or industry experts, in order to promote content which hopefully should be relevant. Potentially a great solution, problem is that now there are so many social media channels that once again the signal-to-noise ratio is interfering again.

I use quite a few social media sites so thought I would show how I use each service for a particular function that keeps me up to date with industry chatter but also allows me to keep in touch with some of the noise from outside work.

RSS

First off is not a social media site as such but more of a service that the majority of sites now offer. RSS allows me to subscribe to regular content from a large number of services which I consider to provide high quality material. My RSS reader of choice - IE7 - looks after everything for me and notifies me that there is new content from a good source which I can read at my leisure. I have gone for a desktop-based solution rather than a web-based solution as I’m mostly desk bound but there are many different solutions out there.

Digg

Digg is a site I have been visiting for a number of years and it pioneered the social news movement. Stories are divided into a large number of topics and people vote on what they consider to be a newsworthy story. When enough people have voted a story becomes popular and is promoted to the front page. If you read the front page you can almost guarantee the stories are good quality and worth your time, comments are usually worth a laugh or two as well.

Digging stories yourself can act as a kind of bookmarking system however I don’t tend to use the service for this, I digg stories more as an expression that I found a particular story good. Digg also allows you to follow friends on the site, the idea being that if your friend found it interesting that you would probably find it interesting too. If you choose a select few like minded friends you are essentially promoting content to each other.

del.icio.us

Like I said I don’t use digg for book marking, for this I use del.icio.us, a social bookmarking site. I use this service not for content discovery but more as a store of sites which has specific information that I would find useful for my work. If I book mark something it will usually be for a page I would visit more than once.

Again with del.icio.us you have the opportunity to make friends and follow each others bookmarks. This for me is not an important feature so I just have a select few friends but I don’t follow their bookmarks too closely.

twitter

Twitter is a microblogging platform and it is only just recently that I have found a good use for it. Twitter allows you to make small statements on a very regular basis, it could very well be likened to the status update on Facebook. There is however a much better use of this service. I use it to follow the industry experts who often use the service to highlight newsworthy material. I don’t find it very useful to follow friends, but people who I have never met, and am unlikely to ever meet to call them friends. In turn I would like to use the service myself to highlight high quality material, with the occasional update on how I’m feeling

Facebook

Probably the most hyped site for the past year, this is the site where perhaps you can be the most social. Hundreds of friends (I wish!), a way to keep up with people you don’t see often enough because of hectic lifestyles! This is the service where I can switch off from the professional uses and use simply for fun. I have a MySpace page as well but I never got serious about it, Facebook is where it’s at! A true social network, in the social sense, but not much use to me in my professional life.

friendfeed

So as can be seen from above there are so many sites which I and some of my friends use on a regular basis. Some people may use alternative services for a similar function, how do you keep up with what everyone is using, and how do others keep up with you? Friendfeed provides a summary view of everything you publish on the net. It also allows you to follow others to see everything they are doing in a summary view. I once again use this for a select few friends, I don’t want the signal-to-noise ratio to be destroyed here as well!

So as can be seen there are a lot of facets to the social landscape, but they are important tools for me and could be for you too. I recommend getting involved in them - join the social revolution. I’ll leave a few links to my profiles below, feel free to follow me or become a friend!

• http://digg.com/users/cs96acb
• http://del.icio.us/suicide_al
• http://twitter.com/suicide_al
• http://friendfeed.com/suicideal

Five by Five have just launched an online campaign for Guitar Hero Rock Icon with gaming publisher Activision.

The purpose of the site is to provide the community with an environment where they can share the fun of Guitar Hero. Five by Five developed a fantastic competition site that allows a user to upload a video of themselves rockin out and be displayed within the video gallery. There is a backend CMS system that allows moderators to vet and edit the videos into a montage of user generated content. 

The site also includes a blog, competition details for a money cant buy prize, and game information on Guitar Hero Legends of Rock. 

The site was launched with a viral movie along with traffic drivers including online PR, banner advertising and email marketing. If you are a secret rocker why not enter one yourself - www.releaseyourrockstar.com 

Question of Footie is a fun and interactive game developed for WKD. The campaign supports the laucnh WKD Nuts Football Awards 2008 with the key objectives being data capture and brand awareness.

Question of Footie was designed as a flash magazine with each page of the magazine being a new round of the game. The types of questions include pin the mullet on the striker, observation rounds and some tricky Footie knowledge rounds.   

And as for the prize? Every player who completes the quiz is entered into a prize draw to win a Footie trip with their mates to the mighty Barcelona Nou Camp to watch a game. The forward to a friend functionality puts a viral edge on the game as users forward onto the mates to increase their chances of winning the trip, thus extending reach of the 2008 Nuts WKD awards and working towards the objective of data capture. 

Try your luck at Question of Footie - http://www.wkd.co.uk/footie