iBizDaily

This is really too funny - some Microsoft employee ran a test last weekend to see what search engine was more relevant... that soon devolved into a mess. But this quote from the pollster is priceless:

Indeed, Kordahi eventually yanked all the poll results altogether, complaining about "some douche gaming the system."

It really is pretty amazing that these captains of industry and masters of the universe will stoop to, on all sides.

As I am working on a new review system for one of my sites in Movable Type, I am having a lot of issues. One was how to let a user generated entry (a "review") have a field to add tags. It is hard to find the documentation or how to on the MT site, and I found the question asked on the MT Forums (but never answered), but the generous and gracious Dan Wolfgang (http://www.eatdrinksleepmovabletype.com/) emailed me the answer today, saving me who knows how many hours:

<textarea id="entry-tags" class="ta" name="tags" rows="2" cols="50"></textarea>

That line goes in your "Entry Form" template, and as long as you have the "'Tags" template included on your "Entry Detail" template you are good to go (and of course they also show up in your tag cloud, etc.).

Just a note to myself really, but maybe something that will give others pause. You don't get something for nothing. You can't implement a technology, and then not follow up on and work on the program the technology gives you and expect results. If you do something that is public, and then let it whither without support and follow through, you look even worse.

Maybe I am talking about affiliate marketing, maybe something else - but it applies everywhere. As a business of any size, don't put something in place without committing to it. There are times to cut losses of course, if something doesn't work it doesn't work - but half assed attempts are not professional and will end up hurting you in the end.

Clicktale is an interesting start up that provides insights into your website traffic, using what they call "In-Page Web Analytics". Some of what they claim to provide:

Watch Movies of your visitors' browsing sessions to analyze their behavior

Scrolling Heatmaps show where visitors look and how far down they scroll

Link Analytics shows every interaction, hover, hesitation time, and much more

Form Analytics reveals problem fields in online forms that cause visitors to leave

Has anyone tried this technology out? Would be interesting to hear from some real users -

I recently set up a quick demo of Facebook Connect...Basically it gives you the ability to leverage Facebook data for use on your site.

Facebook Connect is the next evolution of Facebook Platform - enabling you to integrate the power of Facebook Platform into your own site. Enable your users to...

Seamlessly "connect" their Facebook account and information with your site
Connect and find their friends who also use your site
Share information and actions on your site with their friends on Facebook

Here is a demo that will log users into Facebook on ibizdaily.com...additionally it lets you invite people in your network to use ibizdaily.

ibizdaily Facebook Connect demo

Interesting post over at smashingmagazine...Not sure I agree with all five reasons... I can see if you are a developer and work either for yourself or you are in a position to make that decisions that will effect an enterprise-wide change in your firms development/deployment environment... if not you may not have much of a choice.

Five Reasons Why Developers are Switching to Mac

Designers and developers have many choices to make when it comes to getting work done, from what frameworks, languages, and image editing software to use, to what platform to run. The latter is an oft debated and controversial topic and the mere mention of it risks setting off flame wars of epic proportions, so in the interest of sanity, we'll try to avoid any direct comparisons to other operating systems.

It's no secret that there has been a growing trend in recent years toward developers, especially of the web variety, choosing a Mac as their main dev machine. In this two-part series, we will examine some of the reasons behind this trend, look at some of the pitfalls of switching to the Mac, and go over the must-have software and configurations every switcher should be aware of.

Anthony, you have been Mac guy since the Mets where actually a good team... any thoughts?

In my eight years at working for ibm.com, I never got a chance to see where our servers where hosted. But I can guarantee, it was probably not at as cool a facility as this one.

Not that 'coolness' is a prerequisite for choosing a data center, but it sure is fun.

The Wolfram|Alpha search engine launches on May 9th...Here is a nice article from h+ that breaks down how it all works:

Despite his disclaimer, Wolfram|Alpha looks like a search engine, in that there's a one-line box where you type in a question. The output appears a second or two later, as a page of text and graphics below the box. What's happening behind the scenes? Rather than looking up the answer to your question, Wolfram|Alpha figures out what your question means, looks up the necessary data to answer your question, computes an answer, designs a page to present the answer in a pleasing way, and sends the page back to your computer.

Let me give three random examples. If you enter the query, "3/26/2009 + 90 days" you'll get a page that gives a date ninety days later than the first date. If you enter "mt. everest height length of golden gate" you'll get a page expressing the height of Mount Everest as a multiple of the length of the Golden Gate Bridge. If you enter "temperature in los gatos," you'll get something like the current temperature, a graph of the temperatures over the last week with projections for the next few days, and a graph of the temperatures over the last year.

There is also a podcast with Stephen Wolfram that gets a bit deeper into the science behind the new service.

Many moons ago, I led the creation of a faceted search system across IBM's PC catalog. Along the way, we experimented with different user experiences. I ran across an article this morning on Designing for faceted search. The salient points are contained below:

• DON'T go crazy with facets. Information overload is bad enough in general--don't add to it by presenting users with 15 different facets. That is hardly "narrowing," and users will generally not scroll too far down beyond the initial screen to locate your more obscure facets. But how do you make sure your facets are focused and helpful?
• DO base facets on key use cases and known user access patterns. A little bit of research goes a long way in identifying key ways users navigate and search your site. Analyzing search logs, evaluating competitor sites, and user research and testing are great ways to figure out what key access points users are looking for. Interviewing as few as 10 users will often give you great insight into what the facet structure should be. Don't skimp on that upfront research; you'll thank yourself later as you continuously refer back to that data while you configure your taxonomy and search engine.
• DO order facets and values based on importance. That might sound obvious, but a lot of sites get it wrong. Not all facets are created equal: Some access points are more important than others depending on what users are doing and where they are in the site. Give them top billing because only the first few will be visible on page load. Same goes for values: Most faceted search engines will allow you to order values based on number of items in that category. This is almost always a better bet than alphabetical ordering, because it dynamically presents the most popular items at the top. When determining order for navigation, again think about your users and why they are coming to your site: Don't obscure the big-play items in an alpha scheme.
• DO leverage the tool to show and hide facets and values. While the free or low-cost faceted search tools don't all offer those configuration options, more sophisticated faceted search solutions allow you to create rules to progressively disclose facets. Think of a site offering online greeting cards. While the visual theme of the card--teddy bears, a sunset, golf--might eventually be important to a user, it probably isn't the first place they will start their search. They will likely begin with occasion (birthday, Christmas), or recipient (father, friend), and then become interested in themes further down the line. Accordingly, we might hide the "themes" facet until a user has selected an occasion or recipient. You can selectively present facets based on your understanding of your users and their typical search patterns (as mentioned in the previous "do").

If you are wondering how the Digg algorithm works, a good place to start is right here.

Specifically I think these are the most salient facts to consider:

• Voting is the dominant component.


• Timing of the votes matter.


• Who submitted the content by domain and submitter.

Amazon sent out an email today and announced inside their affiliate program pages the following:

Change to Amazon Associates program

After careful review of how we are investing our advertising resources, we have made the decision to no longer pay referral fees to Associates who send users to www.amazon.com, www.amazon.ca, or www.endless.com through keyword bidding and other paid search on Google, Yahoo, MSN, and other search engines, and their extended search networks. If you're not sure if this change affects you, please visit this page for FAQs.

There is more to it but I am sure you can find the rest in the news. It may not seem like a big deal, but I am sure that it could put a certain number of people virtually out of business. Key word bidding on certain retail items is both science and art - and Amazon's decision, at this stage of the recession, is pretty curious. Do they feel the Google has their merchandise covered well enough that they are throwing money away paying these affiliates? Or do they plan on advertising themselves more? Either way I am sure it came as a shock to some SE marketers who may have seen a big chunk of their business disappear in an instant. I am sure lawsuits will follow.

This is an interesting approach to data center architecture:

Google's big surprise: each server has its own 12-volt battery to supply power if there's a problem with the main source of electricity. The company also revealed for the first time that since 2005, its data centers have been composed of standard shipping containers--each with 1,160 servers and a power consumption that can reach 250 kilowatts.

Just came across this from techrepublic.com... basically its a list of skills developers will need in the next 5 years:

With the recent changes in the economy, a lot of developers are focused on their short-term job prospects. At the same time, it's important to make sure that you get the most bang for your buck when it comes to taking the time and energy to learn new skills. Here is our list of 10 skills you should be learning right now to make sure that your resume is relevant for the next five years. The list is hardly exhaustive, and there are huge swaths of the industry it won't cover (mainframe developers, for example). Nonetheless, for average mainstream development, you can't go wrong learning at least seven of these skills -- not only to the point where you can talk convincingly about them at a job interview, but actually use them on the job.

Here is the list

1: One of the "Big Three" (.NET, Java, PHP)
2: Rich Internet Applications (RIAs)
3: Web development
4: Web services
5: Soft skills
6: One dynamic and/or functional programming language
7: Agile methodologies
8: Domain knowledge
10: Mobile development

Check out the full post over at techrepublic.com.

Has re-designed their website.

I just added the FireShot plugin for Firefox. What I needed was a way to quickly make notes on a page and share those with the team... The plugin converts the page into an image and allows you to make notes on the image

Here is an example:

FireShot is a Firefox extension that creates screenshots of web pages (entirely or just visible part).

Unlike other extensions, this plugin provides a set of editing and annotation tools, which let users quickly modify web captures and insert text annotations and graphical annotations. Such functionality will be especially useful for web designers, testers and content reviewers.