Entries Tagged 'Internet' ↓

I try not to post too much here about Chattarati, but this is simply too cool not to highlight. Our little band of new media believers cooked up something pretty special to help fuel conversations about local politics here in Chattanooga.

Introducing the Chattanooga Campaign Cash Maps, tracking financial contributions to all mayoral and city council candidates for the 2009 elections. To learn more about how we built the maps and why, read Making Transparency Local on Chattarati.

Over the weekend, my friend and former roommate Raman posted a great bit about the targeted Obama ad he saw when watching McCain’s SNL clip on Hulu. Smart advertising, right? Here’s another interesting example I came across tonight on the Washington Post website:

Out of sheer curiosity (as an internet marketer myself), I had to click through to see the landing page. Go ahead, click through and come back. Did you notice the great headline? “ALL POLITICS ASIDE…this outfit gets our vote.”

I don’t keep up with Michelle Obama’s television appearances, but I do know she’s incredibly popular. The ad implies that she wore a J.Crew outfit during an appearance on The Tonight Show, so there are probably countless women out there who’d love to copy her look. And the call to action plays right along: “Buy it now, before it sells out.”

The only problem? Google AdWords are a little harder to target than display advertising on Hulu… A guy reading an article about Karl Rove’s prediction of an Obama landslide isn’t exactly who they’re looking for. Regardless, it’s timely and clever. Well played, J.Crew.

I spent all of last week in San Jose for the annual Search Engine Strategies conference. I learned a lot, met some very cool people, visited San Francisco and Carmel and even played Rock Band for the first time. (Photos coming to Flickr soon, I promise. Besides, don’t you follow me on Twitter?) And just as with my trip to New York in April, I came back to Chattanooga with a lot of ideas (and questions) about life and work.

I’ve been putting a lot of time and energy into my hyperlocal Chattanooga blog, Chattarati. Last week excluded, I typically spend a couple hours each night looking for story ideas, writing or pondering tactics to help spread the word beyond our (wonderful and loyal) audience of the “connected” crowd. I’ve also got a few other web/social media project ideas swirling around, and every new web site sparks another idea. My book list– which includes everything from Surprised by Hope to Made to Stick to How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone to The 4-Hour Work Week –grows longer by the day. And tonight, for the second time in recent weeks, I had to declare RSS bankruptcy and just mark everything as “read.”

At this point, I believe I’m suffering from “inspiration overload.” Anyone researching a cure for that?

If you read today’s Times Free Press article about Google Street View and decided to look me up, thanks!

Most of my blogging is done at Chattarati, a Chattanooga-centric news and opinion blog.

I’m speechless. This must be a joke: Are You Generic? It’s straight out of the Stuff White People Like playbook — hating corporations and loving t-shirts. (hat tip: Guy Kawasaki)

37Signals tells us why they skip Photoshop when developing a user interface. The reasoning behind their methodology is solid and it certainly supports their focus on usability. On the other hand, it put a spotlight on one of my few complaints about their work: the lack of visual appeal. Clean, user-focused design doesn’t have to look dull, and I’d love to see them bring as much refinement to the aesthetics as they do to the usability.

A high school classmate of mine, Joe Brown, is a locavore blogger who recently traveled to Cuba and explored their local food culture. He also confessed to what many of us have always suspected: “all academics are secretly communist.” Good to know.

And finally, it sure is nice here in Mayberry.

If you’ve been following web analytics commentary in the blogosphere (talk about a micro-niche), you’re probably aware of the ongoing debate about Eric Peterson’s proposed Engagement model. Peterson and fellow analytics guru Avinash Kaushik have respectfully disagreed back and forth on their blogs about the nature and value of such a metric for some time, and I have been torn between the two perspectives. It seems well suited for a site that is not commerce-driven, so I decided to just give it a try and see for myself whether or not it was worthwhile.

I spent a bit of time on Friday working in WebTrends to see how easily I could put together the different components and start tracking Engagement on our site. It wasn’t going too well, and I commented about it on Twitter. A brief conversation ensued with Chris Grant and by the end of the day, our conversation was referenced in a blog post by Aaron Gray of WebTrends about Eric Peterson’s dismissal of Twitter as a marketing tool.

I commented on Aaron’s post to come out in favor of Twitter, but also to say that I disagreed with Eric when he implied that something could not be valuable if it were not instantly measurable. For whatever reason, this stuck with me as I went about my afternoon until finally it hit me. The engagement model is trying to create a qualitative metric out of quantitative metrics. I thought this was a revelation until I reread Avinash’s post on Engagement, where he says basically the same thing:

“At the heart of it engagement tries to measure something deeply qualitative. Yet most efforts to measure it in our world tend to be hard core quantitative.”

At the end of the day, I think I’d be better off looking for a way to bring in real qualitative data from our users and letting my quantitative metrics be quantitative. Next up on Friday Night Running, I’ll take sides in the “Web Analytics is Easy/Hard” debate.

Muxtape has been all the buzz for several weeks now, and I finally got around to putting together my first mix. It’s actually a condensed version of my annual mix cd, which I typically spend weeks compiling and then run out of steam before mailing out. So, thanks to the magic of the internets, you can still enjoy the fruits of my labors. These are mostly a few of my favorite tunes from 2007, with the notable exception of a new tune by Jon Foreman, which I just discovered about two weeks ago and hasn’t left my inner soundtrack since. It’s called A Flask Filled With Hope, and featured artists include: Arcade Fire, Spoon, Andrew Bird, Over the Rhine and BRMC, among others. Check it out at: http://jehawbaker.muxtape.com

I just eFiled our family’s federal income tax return this week using TurboTax online. (Confidential to Ella: Thanks for the additional tax credit!) This was probably my fourth year using TurboTax and I was struck by the fact that it has gotten consistently better every year.

I wish I’d thought to take some screen captures along the way to demonstrate a few particular things I liked about it, but I honestly wasn’t expected to be quite this impressed. Intuit is doing a really nice job with usability; Specifically: setting and meeting expectations, guiding users through a lengthy process, writing copy that is clear and concise without being condescending). I remember hearing Avinash Kaushik speak about their impressive analytics and testing programs a couple years back at a Frost & Sullivan conference. He may have moved on, but it seems Intuit’s sharp customer focus is firmly intact.

Another nice feature they’ve added is a community questions and answers section that ties in to whatever section you’re currently working on. I thought that was a perfect example of taking a “Web 2.0″ concept and making it relevant and useful, and it seems to be fairly popular, based on the number of questions and answers available throughout.

Full disclosure: Wait a sec… This is an honest-to-goodness unsolicited rave review. Seriously, if you haven’t done your taxes yet (Hello, procrastinators!), check out TurboTax.

Despite a bit of sluggish play in the ACC Tournament, this is North Carolina’s year and I really believe Roy Williams is bringing home the second championship since his return to UNC. Go Tar Heels!

Are you bracketized? I’m taking part in the CBSSports.com/Facebook challenge and the Twitter Tournament 2008.

I’ve become a big fan of mobile web browsing over the last few months. Having the “whole internet on your (i)phone” is great, but I’ve also come to appreciate a well-made mobile site. The best example I’ve seen yet is Facebook (or Ta-Da List, if I actually used it). It loses the annoying third-party apps in favor of the essentials, and it’s quick and easy to use.

So it was with a good bit of anticipation that I tried the new mobile beta version of LinkedIn. It, too, is optimized for iPhone and has a nice look, but it is ultimately unsatisfying.

I specifically like their choice of using the Updates tab as the home screen. That’s the first place I look whenever I visit LinkedIn, and I’m guessing that’s pretty common. I’d love to know if they used web analytics or even eye-tracking to make this decision, or if this was simply based on their gut feelings. Browsing through your contacts is simple and the sidebar alphabet listing is a nice touch, since it ties into an existing iPhone convention.

Unfortunately, this is where things start to go downhill. One disappointing omission is the ability to send messages to your contacts or to view your inbox. If I get an email invitation to connect, I’d love to be able to log in on the mobile site and confirm the request.

That’s not what bothered me most about the new mobile site, though. I fully expected that when viewing one of my own contacts, I’d be able to then see their list of contacts (aka “my network”) and maybe even have the option to get introduced or send them a message. When you’re building your brand around your ability to connect people, leaving that functionality out of your site — even your mobile site — is not a good idea.

I really believe this can be a great mobile site if they take another look at what the priorites of their users are. But for now, I’ll be sticking to the standard version of LinkedIn.