Web 2.0

A while ago, I was searching for a way to make some money with an older domain of mine. There were a ton of options, and all of them seemed good as money or traffic generators. Some stood out – everyone who’s ever looked at the online side of their business and thought “I could make this work for me” has looked into Google AdSense or affiliate programs. More recently, we’ve delved into an even better way to make your site the best possible one-stop-shop for visitors. These would be the Batman utility-belt of the consumer-savvy web-designer: the widget.

It does what?

Widgets are ingenious little fellows that you settle into the sidebar or various other digital playpens of your web-pages. They do all sorts of things, from providing lists of useful links and recent posts, to offering you DVDs based on the article you’re reading and allowing you to Tweet what you’ve just read. It’s a fascinating wealth of opportunity – do you offer Twitter functionality on the homepage, or on press-release pages? Do you allow users to add your CEO on Facebook? Do you need a meta/login widget? The choices are endless, and it’s all too tempting to get so many  that your website begins to look less like a coherent online representation of your products and services, and more like a scrapbook.

If you’re running your site through another site-building engine and built-in CMS, like WordPress and their .com and .org solutions, then you’re in luck – many widgets come as standard for .com. If you’ve opted for the self/externally-hosted .org option, there are countless communities across the web who make and upload their own, mostly for free. It’s as simple as installing a small bit of software on your computer – plug in the plug-in, and in no time at all you’ll have additional functions for new users.

It’s important to make sure you’re choosing the right ones – I know it’s tempting to get loads of widgets that let users do just about everything, but there’s a fine line between using a sharing plugin (digg and reddit, for example) and allowing users see which of their cousins are on Facebook right now. If you’re a social media company, the latter is fine, but if you’re an Independent Financial Advisor (IFA) with 30 years of industry experience, then this may not be the ideal representation of your attitude to online business presence. The widgets you use are as representative of the company’s tone and style as your choice of t-shirts vs. suits for big global conferences, and the wrong choice can make your business’ web design look slack or uncaring.

Let’s take an example – if you’re a site that does custom kitchen design, then there are a fair few ideal widgets that would come in handy. First, you could offer them a widget that displays the latest galleries you’ve uploaded to Flickr, as a means of offering them a “recent work” section that retains better functionality than an in-built gallery. They know Flickr, they may even use Flickr, and by applying the same brand name to your site as they do to their own lives, then you’re putting the business on a level that makes it seem more human and more appealing – key to ensuring your business spreads and evolves via word-of-mouth, if anything.

Tactical widget deployment

You’ve also got the option of placing them everywhere, and if not placing them in the correct sidebar, then why not taking it a step further, and creating your own? Of course, it requires programming, time, money, and a hundred other considerations – but then again, what doesn’t? It’s no more difficult than organising the business’ tax declarations when April rolls around, as you can contract it out to a programmer and designer in much the same way as Barry the accountant is contracted out to you to sort through the endless restaurant-based “team-building meetings” receipts on your expenses list for the year.

Of course, then there’s the various options that go with that – do you make a WordPress widget? One for all websites? One for the iPhone (an App, strictly speaking, but we’ll discuss those next week) or the Mac’s widget overlay? It’s a tough choice, but I’d again state that it depends on your business. Personally, if I ran an investment firm, I’d want an iPhone-compatible website that ran widgets allowing people to connect via LinkedIn, and possibly even one tracking the stock market and another crawling finance feeds from global papers and displaying them for people to scroll through as they explore the site. All of this would be free, easy to install and afterwards make the site, its design, and therefore the business look clued-in and web-savvy enough for the visitors to have faith in them as they make big investments in a new, scary, more-digital-than-ever environment.

It’s also worth considering their source. If you’re not aiming for commercialisation and want to remain professional, ensure the widgets are for functionality only, and have no secondary agenda. This rules out the Amazon Associates widgets, for one, which may be a slight dent in your plans for monetising a site. However, it also means that you’re not associating yourself needlessly with a vendor of goods that is world-renown, as any poor performance on their part is therefore tied to you – though only if you’re working in a private-sector, b2b environment. If you’re a big, outrageous blog about celebrities and big hair, then by all means, ensure Amazon’s recommendations widget has Hair: The Musical‘s DVD release displayed proudly on the sidebar. If you’re not, stick to news.

My personal pet hate is the ridiculous amounts of sharing widgets on the bottom of each page, as I feel most of them are so seldom used that their existence on the page is, for all intents and purposes, pointless. But that’s just me – everyone’s got their own tastes, and it’s easy to appreciate why they’re on the page when they’re well-chosen and well-placed. So if you’re appealing to your resident widget-fidgets, then go in guns blazing, and allow them to log how many bullets you’ve fired in that little box on the right-hand side of your site at the same time.

It’s here; the final frontier. The Big One. The moment everyone’s been waiting for – Web 2.0. Hold on, what’s that? It’s already been and gone? Well, I’ll be damned. I guess my text-only, black-and-grey page with endless raw URLs and no .gif files is going to do down fairly badly. As are all the business sites who are still refusing to embrace the amazing impact web design can have on their traffic, business image and message in a world that’s all about the online.

It’s a tricky business, reorganising and redesigning a site. If it’s essentially an address and a floating logo, it’s no big deal to have it prettied up on the sly while you keep working away in the office. But if you’re always blogging and dealing with customers through it, it’s the equivalent of a White Van Man’s MOT – he can’t get work without the van, but the van can’t work without the MOT, and he can’t pay for the MOT without the work that comes from owning the van. You follow? Losing a site can be like losing a limb, even if it’s only for a week, but the benefits are huge. Everyone needs to do everything they can to stand out in the digital popularity contest that is 2010′s World Wide Web, and if you’re not flashing your widgets, you’re going down.

Pruning the hedges

First off, you’ve got to look at the aesthetic side of your website, and whether it’s really as good-looking as all its siblings in the same industry. If you’re an IFA and offering a bare-bones Blogspot domain as a means of communicating with your clients, sitting alongside your biggest competitor who’s fully Flash enabled and has Facebook and Twitter integrated into the footer, then it’s likely most people will gravitate to the one that allows them to play Asteroids while the site calculates their service fees. You’ve also got to factor in the realistic prospect of optimising your site for a multitude of different browsers, some of them no bigger than the iPhone’s resolution. Not everyone’s on dual-monitor setups; most are going to be on home laptops, netbooks, and smartphones, so think about this when you’re designing.

I know I’m promoting Flash and Apple’s wonder-phone (Flash doesn’t work on the iPhone, well done Steve Jobs) but the point still stands. There are a lot of people looking for multi-browser and even multi-platform sites becoming the norm, taking it as far as utilising internet campaigns in order to reach their goal. It’s long-term, sure, but it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t take part. Look at the way most businesses are communicating via social networking – most of these operate through smartphones and are optimised for Macs, netbooks and Chrome (the SEO expert’s choice, in my opinion). Giving them the ability to double-check your figures against that press release you just tweeted is a seriously positive bit of functionality.

It’s also worth checking out what you can do with your GUI. If you’ve got a landing page full of adverts, sidebars and endless widgets, most people aren’t going to picture you as the most informative site in the world. If your website looks like this rather than this, then you’ve got a serious problem. In fact, make sure you click the first link – we’ll go forward from there.

From what we can tell, it’s a political news site, though why it’s called Haven Works is unclear. It’s also a complete mess; I asked a web designer friend of mine to take a look and make some suggestions. He stared at it for a few moments, and I turned to him as he sat, pensive, looking at the mess of HTML and horrible, clashing colours. “Strip it out and start again?”

“Yeah,” he said. “It’s just not worth it.”

Some sites aren’t salvageable, and if yours looks anything like that monstrosity, let me offer some advice: delete. Wipe everything, get a basic WordPress site running as a temporary replacement, and seek help. Now, that probably gets a fair amount of traffic simply because of the amount of aggregate articles and traffic it absorbs, rather like the Blob. But it’s not something you’d visit unless you, like myself, are passing it around to your friends and loved ones as a “get a load of this” site, and that doesn’t rake in the customers.

Behind the scenes

When designing a website, a lot of people seem to forget it’s not just shoving a bunch of stuff together in MS Paint and clicking on it. A lot of code and very heavy maths can sometimes go into very slick websites, and programmers work alongside designers to make this happen (though most designers have a wealth of HTML and CSS skills at their disposal as an unofficial industry standard). Breadcrumb trails, clean source code and good loading times are all factors that are managed by people working in hosting, administration and coding, and not the people who’re putting that sun-glare effect on the side of your logo.

Breadcrumb trails are also seriously important – if you’re looking to optimise for social media, think about the length of your URL. www.news.com/18472 is great if you’re wanting people to fit it into a tiny Twitter window. However, it’s not very easy to just reel off verbally, and you might be better off with www.news.com/this-just-in instead. The difference? Not much. Most people use Tiny URL and similar online services when linking to your content anyway – even we do it, sometimes. The point of a clean breadcrumb trail is that it looks nicer. Having domain.com/category/subcategory/subsubcategory/article-929282822 is just sloppy and makes your business’ approach to its web presence look the same. However, if you clean that up and simply give each page its own page without a wealth of parent pages or categories, then you’re more likely to have people remember where they were, and continue from there, if they’ve forgotten to bookmark. Humans can remember “this just in” on a predictive-search browser like Google Chrome. They can’t remember an eight-digit number they saw last Thursday.

My point to you is this – there’s a lot that goes into coding a site, building it up and making it look good, and these are a few points a lot of people (like good old Haven Works) seem to miss. This isn’t the last you’ve heard from me on this topic, though, you’ve been warned. Next week I’ll be tackling widgets and sidebars, and heaven help anyone in social media who’s staring at this sentence with glazed-over eyes. Here’s a tip for popular web-design techniques – if you don’t know it – get it. If you don’t get it, the people who do and their users won’t get you.

Anyone churning their way through SEO and social media news lately is likely to notice an increasing amount of posts and news about Twitter beginning to fail its users on a regular basis. Now, for a lot of people that’s a few regained hours that would usually be spent procrastinating in the office and writing 140-character poetry to loved ones, or, alternatively, Stephen Fry. But for companies who use Twitter as their only source of new-age contact with a consumer base that’s increasingly going digital, and socially digital at that, this could be rather disruptive, and something of a worrying topic to bring up at the next board meeting.

The question is simple: why are companies choosing one social media outlet and running with it to the degree that, if it were to collapse, they would unwittingly cut themselves off from their entire target market? If you’re a company who Tweets, whether as a group, a select team of social media enthusiasts or even someone in Marketing/PR dedicated to the medium, then are you not only wasting your potential by only using one outlet, but putting your entire social media-related business presence at risk as well?

Too little, too late

Let’s be honest – this isn’t the first time we’ve seen businesses face disasters on any scale caused by bad sites or bad software, though software’s definitely the more damaging. CNET once posted an insightful, though rather shudder-worthy post discussing the impact a software failure had on the financial stability of a major company. The bottom line was that the company itself was not held to account for the failings of its infrastructure and its reliance on one piece of software.

Now, this is arguable from both sides of the fence. Yes, even in terms of Twitter (a google search for “fail whale” will give you an idea of the realistic scale of issues with it), the company running the software or website that businesses operate through are ultimately responsible if said companies suffer when the software/site fails. Of course, if this happens with a social media site, there’s a sudden drop in updates and therefore traffic to the blog, which over a day or a week can be rebuilt, steadily. When it goes really wrong is when their blog crashes and they lose all previous posts, or Twitter dies and prevents them from being the first to break industry news – a devastating and horrifying prospect for any business seen to be regularly “on the ball” in terms of new developments in their industry or sub-sector.

However, at the same time, companies are too reliant on one system of doing things, and this largely evolves as a result of the monopoly trend in the digital battle for web dominance. Twitter is never going to be bested when it comes to micro-blogging, and the Microsoft Exchange Server system is an obvious choice if everyone in the office is running to and from conferences with nothing but a netbook and a smartphone to hand.  But to be present in social media circles and rely on only one site, be it Twitter, Facebook or otherwise, is foolish at best. You wouldn’t rely on one leg and never bother having another given the option to have both, right? So why cripple your business in the same manner?

My name is Company A Ltd, and I’m a digital dependoholic

The first step to solving problems like this is simply to spread out. If you’re only running a Twitter, set up a Facebook, even a Flickr account (you never know, allowing the press easy access to pictures of your award-winning team of staff has its benefits, and wastes less of your time when it comes to the news-hounds sniffing around for something to colour their article about Employee 49 with). The same goes for software – if you’re only using TweetDeck and your entire staff roster follows suit, get them to have other options installed (or re-introduce them to their browser, if it comes to it) to prepare for the event that TweetDeck suddenly crashes and the entire tech support department stage a four-week walkout strike. You’d be surprised at the fallibility of online support for software – if Twitter went down and every single account requested support, that’s (judging by January’s statistics) over 75 million angry users. Not a weekend job.

The main issue you have to consider is the support in place in the event of a system/site-wide crash. Let’s take the Twitter example and run a few numbers:

• January 2010 number of Twitter users – 75,000,000.
• Twitter crashes, globally, everyone makes a tech request.
• Time taken to fill out forms on the part of the user, and deal with each request and give a form answer on the part of Twitter, even on auto reply: 10 seconds (thinking along the lines of writing “my twitter account doesn’t work, ” and hitting send, and the receipt page loading on a decent connection).
• Total amount of time to deal with all 75 million requests:
• 750,000,000 seconds
• 12,000,000 minutes
• 20,833.333 (recurring) hours
• 8,680 days
• 23.78 (rounded down, non-leap year) years.

Now, admittedly everyone would get their responses immediately, not one-by-one. But imagine the server capacity to respond, and take into account that almost 24 years of productivity has been lost – it’s enough to give any CEO a heart attack. But of course, if you tweet 50 times a day as a business PR attempt and twitter goes down for a day, that’s 50 tweets lost, and therefore 500 possible re-tweets – 550 tweets talking about your company lost, per day, the equivalent of one or two press releases. It’s a damaging thing to happen, and dependence like this means a lot of companies face a seriously blank afternoon if their means of doing business is lost. Scrooge would be ashamed – we should all still be keeping manual, physical records, but an over-reliance on digitised information, no need for filing cabinets (that new plant looks way better, anyway) and so-called “infallible” backup systems means we run the risk of losing everything.

Remember the Titanic? The “unsinkable” ship? Now apply that to MS Office, your email server, MSN, Facebook, Twitter, and even your phone network and the Royal Mail. Scary, right?

Today, a rather interesting development popped into my sphere of social media awareness – something pertaining to an ongoing that most will be aware of already. Recently, Bangladesh had banned FaceBook due to their outrage at satirical images of the Prophet Muhammad making their way onto the social network. In a show of consideration (and, let’s be honest, sound business sense), FaceBook have now since blocked all images from being accessed in that region, unless you happen to be reading this in Pakistan (in which case, feel free to browse all you like, I suppose).

It was all kick-started by the Muslim attack on South Park‘s depiction of the Prophet (though, interestingly, not their depiction of God as a cross between an orang-utan and a hippopotamus) and the FaceBook community’s response – by drawing him repeatedly. Where there are gods and religious icons, there are people wanting to put a face to a name, and this is where the “satire” mud-slinging begins.

Taking one for the team

It’s not really an issue of what is and what isn’t offensive – the case in point being a Muslim icon of worship – but more of how far across the line certain groups are willing to allow you to go. Many religions openly depict their deities – Jesus is everywhere, along with Ganesh and his various fellow gods. Religions have, for a long time, been the testing ground for many an amateur comic, and poking fun at the powers that be are simply a way of passing the time and being acceptably negative about something questionable. It’s a bizarre social exception – there are thousands of blogs criticising everything from Wal-Mart to George Bush, Jr., and yet religion seems to be the only hair trigger subject.

If you’re not offended, take a look at the FaceBook group that’s been one of the primary targets of anger from the Bangledeshi government. Loads of cartoons and cut-and-paste visual humour that all seem to say the same thing – “lighten up.” But what people are forgetting about the viral nature of the internet is that, with social networking, jokes can often become crazes within days. Take a look at the LOLCAT phenomenon. These images are bizarre and funny, but had it not been for the interconnected and flood-content manner by which we now share information in a post-web 2.0 environment, they’d never have left the network of the few friends that started it off.

With religious icons, many people forget this isn’t just the neighbour’s cat they’re taking the whizz out of. They’re messing with beliefs held by millions of people, and I refer to many an internet anonymity theory that points to the fact that, blessed with a keyboard rather than a face-to-face confrontation, people will attack and mock without remorse. It’s a dangerous game to play, especially with a religious group who are, quite rightly, not too keen on a venerated idol becoming a mere play-thing for the online masses. But the key question that lies within the matter is thus; is it a removal from the consequences of internet humour that fuels these bizarre waves of offensive content, or social media itself?

Chinese whispers

The problem with being offended by an individual, a group, or content on the internet, is that quite simply the response most of the time is “if you don’t like it, don’t use the web.” Not only is this a bizarre, elitist and ignorant way to view the argument, it also propagates the idea that social networks, a haven for every youth new to a keyboard, is nothing but a haven for offensive, arrogant individuals. Although those last three words do tend to describe an astonishing amount of teenage mindsets, for many the discussions facilitated by FaceBook groups or Twitter hash-tags have become key in allowing those who feel isolated by the wealth of faceless information on the web to re-connect, hours after school, college or work have finished.

Unfortunately, it also results in discussions like this one. In the red corner, we have Luke – loves offensive humour, thinks most Muslims are terrorists, and epitomises the mindset that draws such harsh criticism of the West out of people who are, realistically, as peaceful as we are on a person-to-person basis. In the blue corner, we have Zafar, devout Muslim and one of the many upset by the fact that his method of connecting with his friends has been corrupted and ruined by the defamation of something he holds dear to him. Their arguments are simple – Luke is adamant (rather ironically, considering his biblical moniker) that it’s not offensive, and especially not to people who do nothing but shout “death to the infidels” at anything that moves. Zafar doesn’t care, he’d just like the insults to his religion to stop.

Is it really too much to ask? Social media doesn’t make inappropriate or un-PC humour easier to spread – the viral nature of everything from slander to internet Memes has been going for longer than we’ve had social media in its currently world-dominating format. However, it also means that there is now a global platform from which mud can, and will be, slung. Forums, chatrooms – they were all so niche, so specific, and unless you were tuned into their frequencies, whether socially or via the actual URL, it was rare you’d stumble across their less PC statements. But FaceBook isn’t divided into sections – it’s one big mob of people who love to tag their dog in holiday pictures during their lunchbreak, and they sit right alongside politicians, celebrities, racists, sexists, homophobes and all other forms of offensive opinion, because it’s the same site.

The key issue here isn’t what what offensive, but why. Images are always going to plague society when it comes to poor humour, and shows like Family Guy do well to propagate the idea that political correctness has gone too far. But those who throw no caution to the wind when posting to groups like these are opening themselves up. Someone on a forum can hide behind a fake name, even if the admin can nab their IP address mere moments after posting an image of the Prophet. However, on FaceBook, chances are that’s your real name, and the torches and pitchforks become a lot more sharp and hot, suddenly. Keep it clean, or keep to 4Chan.

Google’s much-publicised efforts to turn YouTube into a profitable entity may be nearing an end with the company announcing that 1080p full resolution HD videos are on their way.

Earlier this year Credit Suisse analyst, Spencer Wang said that he believed Google was on course to lose $470.6 million this year mainly because of YouTube’s inability to generate revenue from advertising.

Surely YouTube’s irresistable global presence is enough to make Google an absurd amount of cash via advertisements? Apparently not.

According to the advertising experts, it is YouTube’s video quality that is holding it back in the advertising world.

At a recent press conference that hosted some of the leading minds in advertising, CEO of marketing giant GroupM Interaction, Rob Norman, put it bluntly when he described the technical quality of YouTube, and sites like it, as “complete crap”.

Media agency executive Robert Davis of OgilvyInteractive viewed it similarly, saying, “If somebody put that on TV looking that way, they’d be fired…Why is that acceptable online?”

Last week YouTube blogged the news that should change all that.

“We’re excited to say that support for watching 1080p HD videos in full resolution is on its way. Starting next week, YouTube’s HD mode will add support for viewing videos in 720p or 1080p, depending on the resolution of the original source, up from our maximum output of 720p today.

As resolution of consumer cameras increases, we want to make sure YouTube is the best home on the web to showcase your content. For viewers with big monitors and a fast computer, try switching to 1080p to get the most out of the fullscreen experience.”

While YouTube’s announcement focus’s on the benefits for its users, there is no doubt they will be licking their lips at what the change will mean for them.

Advertisers have applauded YouTube’s latest move. After hearing the announcement, Mr Davis told Beet TV that “this is very good news for the industry”.

“As the visual experience becomes more satisfying, the greater the interactive potential becomes for brands ready to play in the content space. For years, we have been forced to build interactive experience around severely limited, technologically inferior video. Not any more.”

So YouTube has given advertisers what they’ve asked for. Now, can they turn this phenomenon into the cash cow it probably deserves to be?

Check out one of YouTube’s full HD videos below

Or click through and watch the Official Toy Story 3 Teaser Trailer in HD