This month's newsletter is finally out. I waited until today to publish it because I discovered last year that publishing a newsletter a day or two before Halloween resulted in the lowest readership I'd seen in a long time (see the tracking data for yourself).

The newsletter's title is Who Are You Speaking To? How does that relate to robots? The gist of it is that we often focus so much on search engine optimization that we end up creating our content more for robots than for people. Then we wonder why our site isn't delivering any return on the investment of time and resources we sink in.

Head over and read it in full >

Last week I noted a post by John Hagel called Stupidity and the Internet in my post on the The Post-Screen Web. Hagel covered several topics in that post, one of which was the web's effect upon thinking and whether short-form content makes that effect a negative one. He writes:

If it is about content, will snippets trump books and will we all be dumber for it? As someone who has never mastered the art of the snippet, let me proudly count myself as one who still sees profound value in the long form where texture and nuance can be teased out and explored... Snippets of information, loosely coupled, have enormous value in enhancing peripheral awareness and provoking new ideas. At the same time, snippets of information alone are deeply dangerous. They distract us with never-ending waves of surface events, spreading us ever thinner and obscuring the deeper structures and dynamics that ultimately are shaping these surface events. Those of us who stay only on the surface, swimming in a sea of snippets, will ultimately lose sight of land. We need books, or whatever the digital long forms of content are that will replace the book, to help us penetrate the surface and explore the deeper structures and dynamics that make sense of the changes around us.

Don't Panic! We're in the thick of it, but all is not lost.
Ultimately, I think that Hagel is right. In fact, I agree with many of the thinkers who are concerned with the future of literacy in light of our digital life. I am concerned too. When writer's like Nicholas Carr talk about not being able to focus on a book like they used to, I can relate. But I'm not ready to declare a state of emergency. I think we're in the middle of a significant shift in the way we engage with information and learn because of technology and that there's no compelling reason to assume that reading will die. For more optimism like this, watch Andrea Lunsford, a researcher at Standford University, describe her study which led her to conclude that student writing ability has not declined as a result of recent technological changes.

There is a place for both short and long-form writing.
In the meantime, there is a place for both short and long-form writing. Each form has merit as a content strategy, depending upon the goals the writer has. In a presentation I gave recently called Professional Writing for the Unprofessional Writer, I elaborated on the different functions of short formats (i.e. blogs), and longer formats (i.e. monthly newsletter articles or whitepapers). Here's the gist of it:

Short-Form (Blogs)
Blogs take a cumulative approach to tell an ongoing story with many short posts. In other words, if you blog on behalf of your company, you'll want to think long term, allowing the "idea" or identity of the company to be worked out over potentially years of regular posting. Remember, blogs are essentially relational, so when someone subscribes to your blog's RSS feed, they're making a commitment to getting to know you and/or your company. The way you write should respond to that fact. One other thing that I really value about blogging is that it provides a good opportunity to explore new and untested ideas. I feel free to ruminate on things that might be risky and even say things that I'll disagree with later when writing for our blog in a way that I don't with our newsletter.

Long-Form (Newsletter Articles)
Long format writing, on the other hand, develops a single idea in a more in-depth manner contained in one article. This kind of writing requires a more strategic approach. Because of the infrequency of this format (for example, I write one newsletter article each month) your ideas need to be as tested as possible. You're going "on the record" in each article, and at the rate of 12 a year, it will take much longer to bury an idea that you've come to disagree with than it might had you written about it in your blog.

Patience
The only additional consideration of the long-form is that it is much more difficult to win readers than it is with short-formats. It obviously requires much more investment- attention and time- of the reader to get through multiple pages of content, so you have to captivate them early. This is not easy. I'm not sure I know how to do this consistently.

No matter what format you choose to write with, you must be patient and let your voice develop over time. Writing is an art that takes years of repetitive practice to do even passingly well. Again, I'm not sure where I am with that, but I know by reading things I wrote even last year that any improvement from then I owe to the commitment to regular writing.

You may have an easier time following along with my post if you look at a larger version of this chart. Click here to open this chart in another window at it's actual size.

Over the past several months, I've tried to keep a closer eye on how our newsletter campaigns are performing to see if I can draw any conclusions as to what makes one more successful than another. What I've decided is that it all depends upon what you mean by successful...

If It's All About Clickthroughs...
If I evaluate success in terms of the amount of readers who click through to our website from the campaign emails I send out each month, then the winner over the last six months is clear: Doing More with Less came in with more than double the clicks of the next highest performing newsletter, A Practical Guide to Social Media, which had 229. I have some pretty clear ideas as to why this particular newsletter had so much immediate interest:

1. Adapting the Title
   The title "Doing More with Less" is nice and short, and communicates something that would probably appeal to many in our industry, but it's not very specific. That's why I adapted the title a bit in the email version of the newsletter that I sent out. I retitled it to read: "Doing More with Less: 9 Simple Ways to Get More from Your Website." It's much longer, but it quickly communicates what this newsletter is going to be specifically- a list of 9 potential website upgrades that will enable you to do more with less with your website.
2. Imagery
   On the site version of "Doing More with Less," I used an image of Buckminster Fuller next to a quote by him about the idea of doing more with less. The entire lead-in to the article was about him and why he said, "Call Me Trimtab (read it to find out why)." But I had a feeling that an image of Buckminster Fuller would probably not interest many of our subscribers, so they might be likely to ignore this email. I decided to replace it with a simpler image of two screens (see it here).

My guess is that the combination of a more specific title with a simpler image in the email created more interest in the material than had I used the same title and image from the website version.

As you can see from the chart, I'm comparing stats from the first month each particular newsletter article is on our site to the all time stats, so I'll need to wait to see how "Doing More with Less" compares to the others in the months to come.

If It's All About Conversions...
However, if I evaluate success in terms of value added to Newfangled, particularly which articles generated further interest in our material, then I might decide upon a different "winner." The Future of the Web, Part 1 seems to be a contender here. Though it received fewer clickthroughs in its first month (177) and had a higher bounce rate (56%), the average amount of time spent on the site was longer (3:09), the comment string longer (25 comments), and the number of goal conversions highest (60).

Take a Long View
But take a look at what happens when you consider the long-term, or in this case, the stats representing the full amount of time this content has been on our website. From that point of view, I think that A Practical Guide to Social Media may be the winner. It did have more clickthroughs in the first month than "The Future of the Web, Part 1" (229), and a lower bounce rate (44%), but notice the all time numbers: this page has been viewed 1092 times since it was published with an overall average bounce rate of 45%, and has lead to 142 goal conversions- significantly more than any other in the past 6 months.

Evaluating the success of this content strategy is clearly a nuanced procedure that requires some time for data to accrue. Sometimes I find myself disappointed in the immediate response to the newsletters we put out, but in light of this data, it stands to reason that it takes several months to get a realistic picture of the success or failure of any individual article.

Are there any other aspects that I should be looking at? Do you agree with my conclusions?

I just finished reading an insightful post by John Hagel, which he titled Stupidity and the Internet as a response to Nicholas Carr's much-discussed Atlantic piece, Is Google Making Us Stupid? I like the way that Hagel re-frames the discussion based upon form rather than effect. His idea seems to be that "the internet" (I'm going to use "the web" instead) can't be assessed in simple either/or terms of stupifying or edifying, but aught to be considered based upon its currently evolving form. Here's a quote:

The debate also largely took the Internet, and specifically the World Wide Web, in its current form as a given.  This is a dangerous assumption given the speed of change in the underlying technology foundations of the Internet. 

As one small example, we are seeing rapid evolution of both social network platforms and physical presence tools that will lead to a much more complex interweaving of physical and virtual environments. Sensors and imaging tools will give us much greater visibility into the world around us.

This point is pretty important, I think. I mentioned the "fractalization" of the web in Part 1 of my Future of the Web article, which speaks to his point about the increasing complexity and interwovenness of the web. In Part 2, I also thought about the shaping of the web by mobile and "web-enhanced" devices. These two concepts are going to have an extremely significant effect upon how the web is shaped and used in the very near future.

Then Hagel goes on to say something fascinating:

Tacit knowledge – that which cannot be readily expressed in published content of any length, whether snippets or books – has always been our most valuable knowledge. You can read all the books you want on brain surgery, but that alone will never qualify you to perform brain surgery. At an even simpler level, no book can teach you how to ride a bicycle.

The ultimate impact of the Internet on our intelligence will hinge on its ability to support the creation and sharing of tacit knowledge. Again, we are at the earliest stages of tapping into this potential.

This is where my skepticism tends to kick in. I often lament the real experiences I'm not having when I'm spending the majority of my time in front of a screen. Granted, I think what Hagel has in mind is that the potential to create and share tacit knowledge over the internet is contingent upon a post-screen web. In other words, a web that can be experienced and shaped away from the desk or handheld device. While such a web would enable tacit knowledge, it will also narrow the divide between the real and the virtual to such a degree that discerning between the two will be a matter of perspective or opinion. This could be frightening, or... something else.

A client recently asked me what I thought the key 3-5 metrics are that he should be focusing his Google Analytics reviews on. The following was essentially the answer I gave him:

I think that the most important metrics to track on a routine basis would vary depending upon the type of business, but for B2B service companies like ours and most of our clients, I'd list them as:

(1) Referrers - This metric has a much more frequent ebb and flow, and tends to be a good indicator of the scope of your reach. For B2B service, the currency of referrals is just as valuable as any lead you'd capture. Referrals also tend to explain spikes in traffic if there are any.

(2) Top Content - This is ultimately a way of seeing which pages on your site get the most traffic. If there are critical pages on a site that are not among the top 10 or 20- pages that define positioning, state pricing terms, thought leadership, etc., then the goal should be to get them there by working on improving their meta titles, descriptions, and even the copy on those pages. For pages already in the top that should be there, this is a perfect opportunity to evaluate where users go from there and whether the page's popularity can be leveraged with the right call to action. For pages in the top that shouldn't be there (we had a silly blog post called "national donut day" in our top 20 for far too long, skewing our bounce rate), that is an opportunity to adjust its title tag or delete it outright.

(3) Bounce Rate - This metric is slower to change but is probably the most effective means of evaluating whether your content is matching search intent. For organic search traffic (the most critical source for B2B service companies that actually care about connecting with potential clients with content), it may be impossible to hit unreasonably low goals for bounce rate, but it is always worth trying to tighten it up. For comparison, our bounce rate these days hovers around 64% - we've got a ton of content that would interest people that are not looking to hire a web development company, so that's ok with us- but my goal is to get us down another 10% if possible. Search terms kind of goes hand in hand with this metric.

For a far more in-depth review of Google Analytics reports, check out our newsletter, How to Use Google Analytics or our webinar, Google Analytics 101.

I was honored to be asked to share my (limited) writing experience with a class of undergraduates at Boston College. The image above is one of the slides from my presentation. The neat thing about this engagement was that it was all done online. I was asked to record a short lecture and deliver an mp3 that could be played for the class. I decided to take it a step further and put together a SlideCast so that I could make some fancy pictures, too.

I titled this "Professional Writing for the Unprofessional Writer" because I don't consider myself a professional writer- I'm just a guy who does a lot of writing as part of my job. There is a big difference there, one which I think is probably a reality for many people today. We're all probably doing much more public-facing writing for work than ever before. So, my presentation is basically my perspective as one of those people who need to make their public-facing writing more professional. You can view the deck of slides in high quality in the set I added to my Picasa account, or you can watch the SlideCast below:

This morning I published our September newsletter, Doing More With Less. It's been a while since I wrote something like this, which is much more practical and less conceptual than many of the newsletters have been over the past few months. The first half of the list of "ways to get more" contains things you can do simply and at no cost, while the second half contains slightly more complex and costly changes. My favorite one is the last one on Advanced Search Tools.

I think this one is timely- even though the recession is "officially" over, many of our clients are just as concerned with upgrade costs as ever, if not more conservative with their actual spending. I hope that seeing that there are still things you can do for free will encourage people to continue to build in to their site.

Now that Eric, our former CEO, is off to new heights in his career, I've invited him to contribute a few guest blog posts. This is the ninth of several that he'll share in the coming months.

After studying at the Rhode Island School of Design, Eric Holter worked as an engraver and illustrator for Pagano, Schenck & Kay Advertising, then as a web designer at Leonard/Monahan. He founded Newfangled Web Factory in 1995.

This may be the most controversial of my series on advertising agency website gaffes. I’ve been advising agencies to avoid Flash as their website platform for…, well, ever since Flash existed. Let me make it clear from the outset that I’m not against Flash. It’s a great tool that, when used properly, can have a positive impact on website design and functionality. I am, however, against Flash as the primary platform in almost every case (exceptions would include certain website applications, web-based games, and some entertainment-oriented websites). By “primary platform” I mean that the entire website is contained inside a Flash movie file (or series of movie files). I’ve already addressed six reasons why Flash is not a great website development platform in a previous post about Google’s announcement that it now indexes Flash-based content. I suggested six reasons why this was not great news. My overall point was that agencies would now be even more inclined to use Flash–without realizing that there are still significant weakness with the Flash platform. And without very careful attention to Flash programming details, site content can still be locked up by Flash.

Here is a brief recap of the problems identified in the previous post

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1. Content weakness. Agency sites built in Flash tend to be weak on content and rarely updated.
2. URL Linking. Most Flash sites consist of one large Flash movie. This makes linking to a particular page within an agency site impossible.
3. Meta Data. Even with Google’s changes, Flash-based sites offer very few opportunities for search engine optimization.
4. Content Prioritization. An indexed Flash file is searchable, but the content lacks any underlying tags that help search engines determine the relevance and weight of the content.
5. Content Management. Flash is sometimes chosen not because it’s the best platform for the site, but because it’s the easiest tool (for a designer) to master. Which means the site is not likely to have a robust content management system–which means fewer content updates.
6. Distraction of Style Over Substance. More often than not a Flash-based agency website becomes the creative outlet instead of being a place where the agency showcases their creative work and thinking.

The reasons above (see the post for more details on those points) should be enough to persuade agencies to put Flash away and build their websites using standard web platforms.

But often these objective reasons are not enough. I think that’s because the causes of agency Flash dependence go deeper–so deep in fact, that the objective problems with Flash don’t seem to matter to them. Here are some of the underlying reasons that advertising agencies are so entrenched in Flash.

The Creativity Barrier
The “Creativity Barrier” is one of main causes of agency web strategy failure. Traditional agencies are geared to use their creative talents to help their clients overcome consumer inertia and information overload in order to deliver a message. Getting attention is a prerequisite before anything else can be accomplished. But this dynamic is drastically minimized, even eliminated on the web. People click links or type in URLs on their own initiative–not because their attention has been captured by creativity.

The misaligned creative impulse stems from not understanding the role of creativity in web strategy. But there’s more to it. When it comes to the agency’s own website the creativity barrier gets much stronger due to years of pent-up creative frustrations. When agencies present their creative ideas to clients they usually include a few different options. There’s usually at least one bold creative concept (the agency’s favorite). Then there are the other safer, slightly little less creative ideas. To the creative director’s dismay, clients almost always pick the safer ideas. And sometimes they want to water down the already safe concept–draining out out every last bit of creative boldness.

After years of great creative ideas being reined in by clients, agencies need an outlet with less creative resistance (which is why so many creative awards happen to be for the agency’s pro-bono clients). So when it comes to the agency’s own website there’s no client to muck with great creative ideas. The agency can be as bold as they like. And the Flash platform affords them all sorts of opportunities to go nuts: sound, video, animation, transitions. The agency can finally express its unrestrained creativity.

But in the end, these agency Flash sites (while certainly impressive demonstrations of creativity) end up delivering the wrong message. They succeed at saying “we’re really creative” but at the cost of adding the message “but we don’t get web strategy.” The same site on which you claim expertise for guiding clients into the right strategic mix of marketing channels (usually including web) betrays this claim–at least in regard to web strategy. Your example states “we’re willing to forgo a powerful marketing channel for an opportunity to be really creative.”

Project Orientation Rather Than Strategic Orientation
Most “process” pages on agency websites follow something like this pattern: step one–we {evaluate, research, ask, orient}, step two–we {think, plan, strategize}, step three–we {design, create, innovate}, and step four–we {evaluate, measure, refine}. Each step usually starts with a “D” or “P” for alliteration. There’s nothing wrong with this kind of page (though they’re not as differentiating as they ought to be). But have you ever read such a page that didn’t not include a think, plan, or strategize step? Of course not. Nobody proceeds straight to design without thinking first.

Now this may hurt a bit. If we’re sober and honest in evaluating the real depth of our strategic efforts, we’re going to find that we’re really more tactical than we are strategic. In fact, we usually enter into assignments with most of the strategic issues already mandated by the client. Or if not mandated, we establish our tactics even as we hear the assignment for the first time. We’re already thinking, or have been told, that the assignment requires a six page brochure, or a full spread ad, or a point of purchase display. We then move eagerly to the design step.

If you want to check yourself on this reality, just consider how often your clients pay you just for strategy (without rolling it into the project fee or before establishing the project budget in advance). How many clients give you time to deliver a strategy before defining the deliverables and costs? The reality is that many of our firms are more project-oriented and tactical than we are strategic. We all want to think of ourselves as being more strategic (perhaps that’s because we equate “strategic” with “important”) than we really are.

Because we tend to be project-oriented, we think about our own agency site as an internal project–rather than a long term strategy. You can tell that most Flash-based agency websites were treated like internal projects when viewing time stamped content. News items or press releases on agency Flash sites are often very old. It’s because there was never any serious strategic thought given to the on-going content strategy. And if there had been serious thought, the choice to use a Flash-based platform would have been evaluated with more scrutiny.

Instead, someone was tasked with the project of designing an amazingly creative agency website. And once produced and launched, it’s rarely thought about again.

Technology Barriers
Another reason agencies use Flash is that they feel more comfortable with Flash technology than standard web technology platforms (php, asp, ruby, html, caa, javascript, etc.). They are already masters of Adobe software and Flash, while not simple, feels familiar and within their technical reach. To move away from Flash would mean using other, more complex technologies or leaning on technology partners to deliver them. I empathize with the fear of making bad technology choices. And there are many disaster stories that resulted from the uneasy alliances between creative firms and technology companies. There are even more horror stories of freelancers disappearing in the middle of a project, or becoming unavailable to maintain a site when it’s done.

Such problems usually mean that web projects are often unprofitable, almost always frustrating, and in the worst cases threaten an otherwise healthy agency/client relationship. But despite the risks, the days are long gone when a client will accept a Flash-based website from an agency. The agency might be willing to forgo all the amazing benefits a mature website can bring, but clients are not so easily satisfied. So whether it’s for the agency’s site or for an agency client’s website, creative firms must learn how to hire or partner with technology providers.

Lack of Experience With, and Appreciation for, the Power of Content
Agencies are satisfied with Flash, in part, because they have not tasted the power of the web in their own new business development efforts. The previous post described how Flash sites simply don’t perform as well as standard websites. And even non-Flash sites don’t see much action if there’s not a focused, sustainable content strategy in place. But when there is, the power of content on the web is amazing. You probably only come to value this after your first experience of having a well qualified prospect call you after reading much of the content on your site. They’ve already convinced themselves you are the agency for their business. They understand what you do and who you do it for. The sales process is so much easier when qualified, educated prospects approach you. And great websites make this happen.

But since most agency sites perform so badly, the agency has no appreciation for the power of content on the web. Their minimization of the importance of web strategy becomes a self-fulfilling reality. They get no results from their site, so they don’t value the web enough overall. As a result they don’t make efforts to improve/maintain the site, and so the poor performance continues. But ask yourself–why do agencies like Currency Marketing keep up with such a robust content strategy if it doesn’t work? It does work. And every effort of content creation has a considerable shelf life. It keeps working for years, sometimes while you sleep. Every effort becomes a deposit in the marketing bank account. But this doesn’t happen for cool Flash websites.

Moving Beyond Flash
Well, that’s all I got. If you’re still convinced that Flash is the right platform for your agency’s website–good luck with that. But I hope that you’ll take a sober look at your Flash site’s performance and see how much more there is to gain by moving past Flash. If you do decide to move beyond Flash let me know!

Now that Eric, our former CEO, is off to new heights in his career, I've invited him to author a few guest blog posts. This is the ninth of several that he'll write in the coming months.

After studying at the Rhode Island School of Design, Eric Holter worked as an engraver and illustrator for Pagano, Schenck & Kay Advertising, then as a web designer at Leonard/Monahan. He founded Newfangled Web Factory in 1995.

Last year, Google announced considerable improvements in their indexing of Flash based websites. One of my chief criticisms of many advertising agency websites is their propensity to adopt the Flash platform. One of the biggest problems with Flash has been its incompatibility with search engines. This improvement mitigates this problem–to some degree.

After Google announced the new indexing, Brian Ussery performed an in depth analysis of how Google is actually indexing Flash content. Bottom line, there is still a long way to go for a truly search engine friendly Flash site.

So, though the announcement was good news to many, it didn't change the fact that I am still concerned for agencies who use Flash. Technical problems between search and Flash have been significant, but the impulse to build a site entirely in Flash has other problems too. Problems that now, even with better indexing, may be all the more ignored. Agencies that lean too heavily on Flash may be emboldened to do so all the more.

Here are a six reasons why better indexing may not help most Flash websites.

1. Content Weakness: I remember a comment from a Yahoo! engineer about indexing Flash sites. He said, “we’ve been able to do that for years, but Flash sites are typically so content poor that that it’s hardly worth the effort.” Agency sites built in Flash tend to be content weak and rarely updated. They get built, uploaded and left alone for long stretches of time. In my opinion this is one of the biggest problems with Flash sites. While it’s not inherent to Flash, the use of Flash and content weakness tends to correspond. Perhaps due to the flashiness potential of Flash, more time is spend on animations, effects and transitions than on content strategy.
2. URL Linking: Most Flash sites, especially agency Flash sites, consist of one large Flash movie rather than breaking up each “page” into a separate file. This makes linking to a particular page within an agency site impossible. This new change to Google won’t fix this. While all the words may get indexed, a click through to the site will leave the visitor perplexed as to where in the site the content they found in search might be found. And in this day and age of social media, and sharing, lack of coherent URLs makes “talking about,” linking and tagging Flash site content very difficult since only the main URL can be pointed to in a link. There are techniques for creating distinct URLs in a Flash site. Kevin Merritt, CEO of Blist points out that Blist is a Flash-based web application that can link to specific “pages” within the site. Any site that either needs to be in Flash (web applications) or chooses to be in Flash should definitely adopt these practices.
3. Meta Data: One of the most important SEO practices is thinking through page specific meta data like browser titles and descriptions tags (keywords not so much). Even with these Google changes, and even if a competent URL mapping technique is employed, a Flash-based site will not offer any of these SEO opportunities.
4. Content Prioritization: An indexed Flash file is similar to an indexed PDF file. It’s searchable but the content lacks any underlying tags that help search engines determine the relevance and weight of the content. For example, the use of an "h1" tag to surround a headline normally indicates that these words have higher importance than say a caption to a diagram would. Flash movie content will not provide any of this kind of content parsing.
5. Content Management: Flash is sometimes chosen not because it’s the best platform for the site, but because it’s the easiest tool to master (for a designer). Flash skirts around all the messy browser compatibility and CSS display issues of normal web development. But when this is the motive it’s also true that the designer is not likely to implement a a technically robust content management system. And without a decent content management system changes and additions to content must flow through the busy designer, which ultimately just means few content updates.
6. Distraction of Style Over Substance: Flash is certainly capable of some cool creative effects. It’s built by Adobe after all–it’s part of their “Creative Suite.” As I point out regularly, the agency’s strong creative impulses often becomes a barrier to sound web strategy. When creativity serves the content without getting in the way it can be a win-win. But more often than not a Flash based agency site becomes the creative outlet instead of being a place where the agency showcases their work and their thinking. The creative impulse is hard enough for agencies to overcome, choosing a whiz-bang oriented platform for their site can be too much of a temptation to overcome.

I suppose a Flash-based website, if structured properly, broken out into unique URL and integrated with a content management system is a more viable option than it was a year ago, but for all the reasons above I still recommend avoiding Flash as a website development platform for anything other than web applications and movie trailer websites.

Now that Eric, our former CEO, is off to new heights in his career, I've invited him to contribute a few guest blog posts. This is the seventh of several that he'll share in the coming months.

After studying at the Rhode Island School of Design, Eric Holter worked as an engraver and illustrator for Pagano, Schenck & Kay Advertising, then as a web designer at Leonard/Monahan. He founded Newfangled Web Factory in 1995.

It’s 2009 and sadly I still need to write about splash pages–an unfortunate stronghold of advertising agency websites. The use of the “splash page” has a long history (long in Internet years anyway). Back in 1999 I wrote an article for Web Techniques about the appropriate and inappropriate uses of website splash pages. Today that article is moot. There are no appropriate uses for a splash page.

A splash page uses a website’s home page to make a visual impact rather than provide basic information and navigation. Splash pages are usually animated sequences that precede the actual site home page. Sometimes the splash page will transition into the homepage (sometimes seen in Flash based sites) but others require a click through to the home page after the sequence completes. Most splash pages (at least those with a modicum of courtesy) will provide a “skip intro” link so you can abandon the animation and go straight to the actual site.

Splash Page Abandonment
There are some significant misunderstanding of web strategy that cause agencies to utilize splash pages. But before I address those misunderstandings let me share some factual data that I hope is enough to dissuade you from this practice. My analysis of website traffic reports over the years has consistently shown that at least 25% of all site visitors abandon a website at the splash page. At Newfangled we used to have a splash page our site. In fact we spent months building it. But once I saw the abandonment numbers, I dumped it.

Impact–the wrong place at the wrong time.
Agencies are prone to the use of the splash pages because they feel that they make a strong visual impact–and they do. Splash pages, as creative expressions, can be very cool. Unfortunately, when it comes to web strategy, this impact just gets in the way.

Because agencies spend most of their time helping their clients compete for attention in a crowded marketplace, they must exert significant creative power to capture attention before they can get a message across. But when it comes to the web, attention can be assumed. People don’t navigate to a website by accident. Websites aren’t pushed in front of them; they go to them on purpose. They find them in search results, or type in a URL, or click on a link on another site. Attention is gained before they get there. How the site looks, or how impressive an animation is, has absolutely nothing to do with a decision to visit a site.

Agency Sites are B2B, Not Entertainment
When a prospective client goes to an agency website, they want information–quickly and easily. They certainly don’t want to sit through an animation before they can start looking. An agency website is a business to business marketing tool. It’s about information–not entertainment. So splash pages just get in the way and annoy.

Creative agencies sometimes feel like a splash page, or flashy website, is a demonstration of their creativity. And I suppose it is. But creative firms have plenty of creative work in their portfolio section to demonstrate this. It’s a mistake is to think of the site as another opportunity to be creative, rather than a means of showing your creative work.

Are You Being Strategic?
Let’s think about this impulse some more. In fact, let’s hold it up to the claims most creative agencies make for themselves. Every agency claims not just creativity, but creativity as a mean to an end–the client’s marketing goal. They say they’re experts in helping clients use the right tool for the right job. They guide clients strategically. They would never, for example, produce a creative television commercial for every assignment because television makes the biggest impact. That would be stupid. Instead they devise campaigns that work for best in each particular case.

Is a splash page the right tool for the maximum effectiveness of a business to business website? Is turning 25% of visitors away necessary? Is significantly hindering search engine optimization a smart use of the web? Certainly not. What the agency says by the use of a splash page is that they are willing to ignore the best practices of at least one medium (the web) for an opportunity to demonstrate creativity.

Let’s be honest
We’re creatively wired. We love what we do. And who doesn’t have a million stories of clients that picked the worst logo, or the safest (not best) ad, or watered down the concept of a brilliant campaign? It’s frustrating when our creativity gets down-shifted in the real world of clients and corporate politics. But nobody can tell us what to do on our own website, right? Finally, an opportunity to go all out, to give full reign to our creative powers! We’ll get that Communications Arts profile or One Show award for sure!

But at what cost? We may tell ourselves that we’re being strategic about our creative splash page, that we’re making an impact or demonstrating our creativity. But really we’re making a strategic mistake–improperly employing a medium and using creativity in the wrong place. Not a good start for when we want to then persuade a client how smart we are, how expert we are at employing the right marketing tools in the right way for the right goals.

This is the creativity barrier in action. We forget we don’t need to employ creativity to get the click. We just need to fulfill the visitor’s expectation for information. And we want an opportunity for unfettered creative play on our own sites so much that we’re willing to ignore best practice.

All things considered a splash page is a seriously bad idea. I can’t think of any upsides and there are serious downsides. The numbers don’t lie, and our true motives betray us. If you haven’t already, it’s time to dump the splash page.

This morning, I published our August newsletter, Coping with Complexity: Centralized Website Management. This newsletter is a bit different from our typical newsletter in that it is primarily focused on what we, as a company, offer. It's not necessarily a sales pitch, but a strong statement of our point of view looking ahead. We've made many major strategic decisions over the past year, several of which are now coming to fruition with our latest CMS release (actually a centralized website management system, and this is the most complete statement of our vision so far. Do take a moment to read it, and if you're interested in what we have to say, also check out Mark's webinar on measuring your website's effectiveness with Google Analytics API integration.

Also, I started at Newfangled five years ago today! Time flies...

Now that Eric, our former CEO, is off to new heights in his career, I've invited him to contribute a few guest blog posts. This is the sixth of several that he'll share in the coming months.

After studying at the Rhode Island School of Design, Eric Holter worked as an engraver and illustrator for Pagano, Schenck & Kay Advertising, then as a web designer at Leonard/Monahan. He founded Newfangled Web Factory in 1995.

As an agency consultant I spend a good deal of time visiting agency websites. I haven’t counted precisely, but a large percentage of the agency sites I visit attempt to take over my browser. These sites either launch a new window, or maximize my browser to fill the screen. Before I calmly explain why this is a very bad idea and a poor web strategy I must vent some rage… PLEASE STOP! STOP STOP STOP. YOU ARE NOT INVITED TO REARRANGE MY DESKTOP!

Ok, that felt good. The impulse to control the browser window is common among advertising agencies. It stems from the art director’s historic ability to precisely control every aspect of page layout, typography and design. I remember in the old days prepping a Dexter Shoe ad layout for Hal Curtis (a creative director whom I greatly admire). It involved sending out for a photoset type galley, scanning the text, enlarging it on the Cannon copier (not the Minolta) and finally reducing it back down to size with the stat camera to achieve a subtle worn, slightly grainy feel. Hal Curtis is a true craftsmen, and this full spread ad was an award winning thing of beauty.

Agency art directors are used to this level of control over layout, so the idea that they need to design for a format that has no fixed width or height is sometimes just too much to endure. When they ask if there is any way to control the browser’s size (thus ensure their carefully crafted web page layout’s integrity) and hear that yes it’s possible but… what ever follows the “but” goes in one ear and out the other. If there is a way to control the browser that’s what they want (and they usually get their way).

But this is a mistake. First of all it’s just plain rude. I have my desktop situated very carefully. I’ve set my browser’s location, in relationship to my Instant Messenger, my Rhapsody player, and other windows as well my browsers width to maximize my productivity. If you maximize my browser window you screw all that up. It’s so inconsiderate and arrogant to think that I would of course want to maximize my browser to see your wonderful web design in all its full-screen glory.

Now some agencies just pop up a smaller window rather than maximize the entire browser. This is less obtrusive and not as infuriating as maximizing my browser. But it seriously hurts the effectiveness of the agency’s site. For one thing, it pretty much closes the door on search engine indexing. When Google or any other search engine sees a link embedded in javascript (which is what you need to use to pop a window and control its size) they ignore the link. That’s because this technique can be used to maliciously redirect link from one page to an entirely unrelated (spam) page. So if you feel so strongly about preserving your layout that you’re willing to dismiss all search engine traffic, you may have a clean layout, but you’ve proven that you can care less about maximizing web strategy. Not a good idea in this day and age when the advertising agency’s influence is slowly eroding due to its weakness in digital media and web strategy.

One other reason browser size should be left alone has to do with the content of the website. Effective websites are content rich.Website’s that have gone through the trouble of controlling browser size usually also want to control copy length. They want to preserve the layout and not mess it up with lots of paragraphs (Oh, the horror!). So browser control leads to copy control, which tends to make sites static and shallow.

I was pointed to this presentation by the smart guys at dtdigital who posted to Twitter that it was

The best "measuring ROI of social media" preso we have seen so far.

I agree, it's pretty good. Although, I'm left wondering why the 'big boss' wasn't able to access the data that eventually vindicated his social media team when he decided they needed to be cut...

Now that Eric, our former CEO, is off to new heights in his career, I've invited him to contribute a few guest blog posts. This is the fifth of several that he'll share in the coming months.

After studying at the Rhode Island School of Design, Eric Holter worked as an engraver and illustrator for Pagano, Schenck & Kay Advertising, then as a web designer at Leonard/Monahan. He founded Newfangled Web Factory in 1995.

closerlook is a relationship marketing firm specializing in healthcare (pharmaceutical, health insurance, and health information technology). They have an excellent agency website that builds upon tight positioning with a significant content strategy. So let’s break it down:

Positioning: Here’s how closerlook states their positioning in the first paragraph of their home page,

“closerlook a relationship marketing firm specializing in healthcare. We help clients in the pharmaceutical, health insurance and health information technology industries establish long-term relationships with their customers.”

This focused positioning is also evident by the industries listed in the main navigation and the two featured projects on the home page. If you dig one click deeper into the “About closerlook” page, their focus is restated in a big blue heading, “closerlook is a relationship marketing firm specializing in healthcare.” When executed properly an agency’s positioning and its content strategy reflect and reinforce each other–which makes it difficult for me to know when to segue from a review of their positioning to their content. Since the closerlook website does succeed in integrating positioning and content let’s proceed to a review of the content.

Content: The closerlook site strikes a balance in terms of the amount of content on each of their top level pages. They provide adequate depth and detail without overwhelming with too many words. They could do a little better job pulling their positioning down into these main sub-pages. For example the strategic capabilities page has excellent content, including descriptions of specific capabilities like “Segmentation and Targeting,” “Instructional Design,” and “Usability Testing and Analysis,” among others. However, aside from the case studies contained in the page’s side bar, there is little to reveal the firms specific expertise in healthcare relationship marketing. This is an important consideration since search engine traffic most often leads visitors directly to these content-rich sub-pages first. And considering how quickly visitors evaluate a site–especially when in “search mode,” getting to the point quickly–with as few additional clicks possible, is a high priority.

It’s a worthwhile exercise to examine each sub-page as though it were your home page. After all, these pages will function as surrogate home pages (at least in terms their first impression function). You’ll want to help the visitor who hits a sub-page first to catch the plot of the site without having to click much further. Adding phrases about healthcare and relationship marketing to each sub-page can really help. In addition, the use of a tag line in the logo and strategic browser titles can also help frame in the positioning on each sub-page.

closerlook fleshes out on their content strategy with whitepapers, case studies, a news section and two blogs. Their general agency blog is called “Work + Play.” I like the title because it points out how agency blogs can have multi-faceted effects. They can demonstrate expertise while at the same time offering a glimpse into the agency’s personality and culture. Blogs are also effective at simply sharing information and engaging with the design community at large. Their second blog is called “Experience RM,” and focuses on how their approach to customer relationship management is unique.

Oh, and closerlook also uses video quite effectively. They have a Flash based video on the home page (it’s okay, this is one use of Flash that is very appropriate and effective). They’re very considerate to only play a silent video montage by default–allowing the visitor to start the full video via the play button (thanks!). They’ve also used video on their Experience RM blog to explain their concept of relationship marketing.

One thing that is oddly missing is a section about the principals or employees. This is a fairly ubiquitous form of content for most agency sites, and is generally helpful in getting to know the firm. I’d add a section to the Company area with bios and photos (and link to any blog contributor’s posts).

Platform: I cannot detect a CMS under the hood, though the content is kept up-to-date, so I’m assuming there is a system in place. If so, it’s well configured with clean URLs, ability to affect meta info and browser titles. While the site does provide unique browser titles on each page, the choice of words could be refined, and made more effective for search engine optimization.

Design: The visual design is clean, professional, and easy to read. I like how they’ve consolidated content by truncating lengthy paragraphs with a “more” layer and link that reveals the rest on click (see the Strategic Capabilities page). closerlook has been very restrained in their use of graphic typography. They’ve managed to create a well crafted typographic design with straight text and CSS styling. Even their main navigation and sub navigation is text based!

My only area of discomfort with the user interface is the two click main navigation bar. The first click opens the sub panel then the second click brings you to your destination. This is a pretty minor issue, but I think a standard drop down menu would better serve the visitor and speed up site exploration. There is also a very minor bug in the home page video (at least on my computer–Vista/Firefox 3.0.4). It seems to start playing the audio on load but then stops–producing a one chord sound before catching itself.

All in all, this is a notable example of a successful agency website.

This morning, I started reading a blog post by Joshua Porter called The Agency Problem, in which he asks why web projects continue to be done through agencies in one-off fashion. Here's a quote that explains his point of view on this:

For many people in the web design industry, design projects have a specific start and end date. The end date specifies when the design (the mockups, code, or custom CMS) will be delivered. After the end date, the engagement is over and both parties move on. This way of working grew out of the print industry and as creative folks migrated over to doing more business on the Web they’ve brought this methodology with them. And it makes sense for print…once the print version is printed there isn’t much left to do except work on something else.

Increasingly, though, social software is showing just how detrimental this sort of engagement is for web design. I dub this the Agency Problem. The agency problem is the problem of doing one-off work in a world in which software is becoming a service that needs constant attention. And that constant attention isn’t just the attention of community managers: it’s the attention of designers as well, who need to constantly refine and rework small changes in the interface based on the emergent behavior of the people using it.

As I read this, I shouted in my mind, "Aha! That's why it's all about the long-term relationship!" A typical web project for us at Newfangled can take anywhere from 6-9 months, from initial consulting, through prototyping, design, build, design application, quality control, content entry and going live. It's a long, involved process during which we build a very close relationship with our clients. Why would we ever walk away from one another after go-live? We, as the web partner, are best positioned to know exactly how to assist in the continued use and growth of the client's website, not to mention their web marketing and content strategies *as they evolve* (not just backing up the initial "big idea"). Our Total Managed Support model was created specifically for this- because the tools we build are only as valuable as the expertise and relationship upon which they are built- what it means is that the Project Management teams that work with our clients during the initial project provide regular, proactive service to our clients moving forward, making strategic suggestions, assisting in data analysis, planning the functional growth of the application, etc.

Finding this post was timely, as I had just been thinking of these issues after reading Mitch Joel's post suggesting that maybe it is time for marketing to move away from "the big idea". Here's my full comment on his post, which gets at the core ideas behind our long-term relationship approach, but I have to admit that I'm surprised that such an approach would be so rare among web development firms:

Mitch,

You've got a great point, and evidently the courage to bring it up. I recently saw a blog post (can't exactly remember where or who wrote it, but that further emphasizes the point) that remarked that the experience of blogging was essentially routinely throwing out many ideas and seeing the minority of them catch on, though not being able to really predict which ideas are not DOA. Whether it be the pace by which we receive and consume information, or the equalizing effect of communication tools, there is just more out there, making the "big idea" a whole lot smaller simply virtue of being among such a vast array of other ideas. All that effect-of-web-culture stuff aside, I think there are a couple of other points that back up your suggestion that perhaps the big idea mentality in marketing is passe.

The first is that it's ultimately contrary to what brands are after- loyalty. From the consumer perspective, what is the big idea behind Coke? It's not the tagline du jour, the packaging, the commercials, the holiday Santa stuff, or any other promotion. It's the soda, which many people have been drinking their entire lives. Sure, Coke has that luxury, but the point is that the big idea for consumers is always going to be the product or service. Their attention has to be earned by having a good product or service, not just a witty advertisement.

The second is the value of a long-term relationship. You noted that often agencies come on board for one pitch, and the potential execution of that campaign, but are often cut loose when that campaign gets stale. What if a brand invested in a long-term relationship with an agency because that agency was able to demonstrate their understanding that the lifetime of a brand is a mosaic of different ideas over time? I'm completely with you on this. In fact, the long-term relationship is a defining characteristic of our business- we don't spend 6 months to a year developing a website marketing and content strategy, prototyping, designing, and building new websites and applications only to part ways once they go live. When the initial project is finished, that's when things get really interesting- when it becomes a long, but steady, progression of ideas that are tried, measurement, and reflection upon which work and why. It's a great model for web, and seems to me would be even better for agencies of record.

Chris

Our focus on the long-term relationship and total managed support has been the natural conclusion to years of experience with new development projects and assisting our clients as they figure out the web. It never seemed like a novel thing to me, nor came as an epiphany at any point to our team, but as I read more and more accounts of people growing discontent with limited project models and "traditional" agency approaches, I'm beginning to appreciate how revolutionary the long-term relationship really is.

In responding to a comment from @MaggieB on our May, 2009 newsletter, A Practical Guide to Social Media, who credited us for devising a "Newfangled" marketing method, I brought up the concept of "multiples," or the phenomenon of simultaneous discovery. Here's my comment:

I wish we could take the credit for this approach, but it has really coalesced for us based upon many things: Direct input from people we trust in the industry, books we've read, and a general sense that things we've been doing for a while now and ideas we value are becoming more valuable to others. One interesting point is the concept of multiples, which Malcolm Gladwell discusses in a column he wrote recently in the New Yorker called "In the Air." Here's a pertinent quote:

"This phenomenon of simultaneous discovery—what science historians call 'multiples'— turns out to be extremely common. One of the first comprehensive lists of multiples was put together by William Ogburn and Dorothy Thomas, in 1922, and they found a hundred and forty-eight major scientific discoveries that fit the multiple pattern. Newton and Leibniz both discovered calculus. Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace both discovered evolution. Three mathematicians 'invented' decimal fractions. Oxygen was discovered by Joseph Priestley, in Wiltshire, in 1774, and by Carl Wilhelm Scheele, in Uppsala, a year earlier. Color photography was invented at the same time by Charles Cros and by Louis Ducos du Hauron, in France. Logarithms were invented by John Napier and Henry Briggs in Britain, and by Joost Bürgi in Switzerland...For Ogburn and Thomas, the sheer number of multiples could mean only one thing: scientific discoveries must, in some sense, be inevitable. They must be in the air, products of the intellectual climate of a specific time and place."

In our case, I wouldn't want to inflate the importance of what we're doing by directly comparing it to the kinds of discoveries that Gladwell mentions. But, the general point applies: Sometimes significant ideas occur in multiple places simultaneously, and can best be attributed to the zeitgeist rather than one innovator. I think that is partially what's happening in our industry. That said, there are important figures that have been at the forefront as mouthpieces for these ideas: Levine, Locke, Searls, and Weinberger, who wrote The Cluetrain Manifesto, as well as David Meerman Scott, author of The New Rules of Marketing and PR. I'm sure there are many others that can be credited...

Obviously, our approach was not even a "multiple" in this sense, but simply a practical response to the daily goings-on of our industry, or in other words, a result of being tuned in to the zeitgeist of the web. But the idea of multiples has stuck with me all the same- there is something about it that must apply to what we're experiencing today. Then, this week, I ran in to another quote on the topic of simultaneous discovery, this time from Kevin Kelly, who in a post to his Technium blog called The Progression of the Inevitable, refers to it as "synchronicity:"

Synchronicity is not just a phenomenon of the past, when communication was poor, but very much part of the present. Scientists at AT&T Bell Labs won a Nobel prize for inventing the transistor in 1948, but two German physicists independently invented a transistor two months later at a Westinghouse Laboratory in Paris. Conventional wisdom credits John von Neumann with the invention of a programmable binary computer during the last years of World War II, but the idea and a working punched-tape prototype were developed quite separately in Germany a few years earlier in 1941 by Konrad Zuse. In a verifiable case of modern parallelism, Zuse’s pioneering binary computer in wartime Germany went completely unnoticed by the US and UK until many decades later. The inkjet printer was invented twice; once in Japan in the labs of Canon, and once in the US at Hewlett-Packard, and the key patents were filed by each company within months of each other in 1977. “The whole history of inventions is one endless chain of parallel instances.” writes anthropologist Alfred Kroeber. “There may be those who see in these pulsing events only a meaningless play of capricious fortuitousness; but there will be others to whom they reveal a glimpse of a great and inspiring inevitability which rises as far above the accidents of personality.

Somehow, looking at this in terms of synchronicity, which Kelly points out can happen in multiples of more than just two or three, seems more applicable to today. It's harder to see in the same landmark way that things were seen even a decade ago because the transmission of new information is so much more rapid today, but synchronicity is driving the pace of web technology, too. What's unfortunate is that it's also driving the desire to always remain on top- to have the most active blog, the largest list of followers on Twitter, friends on Facebook, or reblogged posts on Tumblr (tumblarity, really?) because of our ambition to be recognized as an innovator- the person who came up with the idea first. But consider how difficult that would be to prove today! Perhaps you "tweeted" your new idea at 8:59pm, but several others posted similar concepts between then and 9:05pm. Were you really first? Maybe not. But ultimately, what does being first matter? What if we were to put away that kind of ambition and elevate cooperation instead, celebrating the synchronicity of our minds enabled by communication technology and the resulting collectivity of ideas? Maybe then we could move past the novelty stage of the web, using it to do more than just create avatars that live there but actually communicate and educate.

After all, one of the most powerful applications of the web could be for education if we so chose it to be.

Earlier this year, I read a business book called What Got You Here Won't Get You There, by Marshall Goldsmith, who, as a corporate coach, takes executives through what he calls "360 reviews," evaluating people from peer feedback and identifying bad habits and traits that hinder growth. He points out that these traits are often in place prior to the achievement of success; indeed, that many are often successful despite having some significant bad habits, yet continued success is hindered by them. I found myself wondering which of the 20 bad habits I didn't have, but was relieved when Goldsmith assures his readers that most people tend to only really have 2 of them in a significant sense.

Early in the book, he relays an anecdote of a very successful consultant who ultimately loses a contract because he didn't stop to listen to his potential client during their first meeting. His over confidence in his expertise and lack of humility led him to do all the talking, leaving the client alienated and lacking in any confidence in him. This story stuck with me because I identified that this kind of pitfall was quite likely in my own line of work- we have to really listen to our clients in order for any of our expertise to even make sense or be used. We can't just exist in a vacuum; we must listen just as much as we must talk. This leads me to a post I read the other day by David Sherwin, which he titled Strolling to Conclusions. Here's a quote:

"Roads lead to alleys. Alleys lead to dead ends. And you can't see them all before you've entered into a client engagement—no matter how much of a "design expert" you say you are. "I've done a ton of logos, so this project is a cinch for me. In the client meeting, I'll share with them some design themes I've been exploring when drawing up my estimate. Just some riffing, really... nothing too serious that I can't back out of when the paperwork is finalized... It'll just help me cinch the gig." What a bad habit. Sure, we get excited about the possibility of a new project and start sharing initial impressions that come to mind. But sharing your opinion like that—off the cuff—can be very damaging for the project you're looking to start, your long-term relationship, and the design profession in general. It belies an assumption that you are more important than the gazillions of people out there that form the basis of your client's design problem."

Sherwin is pointing out just what Goldsmith warns about- overconfidence that leads to not listening. This is certainly an area where I need to grow.

Consider this an echo to my post from July on A Value-Based Content Strategy: I really enjoyed and appreciated Tad Toulis' Core77 post, No more feeds please! How abundant information is making us fat, which definitely touches on something I think most people are sensing- the overload not just of available information, but also the individual compulsion to create and consume more information. Anyone working in a web-related field, not to mention news and entertainment media, likely spends the majority of their time with an anxiety fueled by trying to simply keep up. Toulis compares this economy of information with industrial food, which can be simplified to a law of more is less- more calories, less nutrition, or more content, less value. He puts it well here:

"Fueled by social media sites and ever-cheaper devices, information production has continued unabated over the course of the present recession. To be sure, the widening array of voices that feed this dynamic and its democratizing effect are fantastic achievements, but undermining these accomplishments are the less admirable effects of a 24/7 media culture run rampant. Simply put, there's too much bad stuff out there; too many points of view and way too much noise. In our ever compressed lives, where tweets and posts compete tirelessly for our attention, this hallmark of contemporary life threatens to invite a pan-global case of attention deficit disorder the likes of which no Ritalin prescription could combat."

Questioning the value of content has been central to the thinking behind our own marketing and content strategy at Newfangled. We've been prolific in our writing over the past few years, but are now at the point that calibration and value are our primary concern, not frequency or volume. In my own experience online, I wish that those who operate primarily online (developers, designers, strategists, marketers, etc.) would come to the same conclusion, not just for my sake, but for their own, too. Keeping up with a realistically unsustainable pace of content creation is just not healthy, nor is it truly productive.

For a scientific take on this, check out what Jonah Lehrer has to say about the addictive properties of information.

Now that Eric, our former CEO, is off to new heights in his career, I've invited him to contribute a few guest blog posts. This is the fourth of several posts that we'll feature from Eric in the coming months.

After studying at the Rhode Island School of Design, Eric Holter worked as an engraver and illustrator for Pagano, Schenck & Kay Advertising, then as a web designer at Leonard/Monahan. He founded Newfangled Web Factory in 1995.

When I critique advertising agency websites the first aspect I evaluate is positioning. Positioning is a foundational element for an effective web strategy.

Positioning is defined as “what you do,” “who you do it for,” and “what the benefit is to them.” For example the positioning for Newfangled would be broken down like this. What do they do? They build websites. Who do they do it for? Advertising agencies. What is the benefit? Newfangled helps them transform their websites into powerful new business engines.

Defining a sharp position statement is critical for an effective and sustainable web strategy. That’s because web strategy is primarily expressed through a content strategy. And developing compelling content on a regular and sustained basis is hard work. But hard work is always made easier when you have the right tools. A good sharp axe makes the task of chopping wood easier–you can exert less force with fewer blows.

Think of your positioning as the edge of your axe. If your firm’s positioning is sharp (focused, narrow, and clearly defined) the effort needed in content creation will be much less than if the positioning is dull (over-reaching, broad, and generalized). Not only is content creation easier with sharp positioning, it’s also more compelling and effective. Conversely, an out of dull-edged content strategy is hard to sustain and its results are ineffective. Most agency sites I’ve seen that have made a stab at devising a content strategy (such as blogging) they usually do okay for a few months. They’ll start out with a few posts per month, but soon the fatigue sets in. Ideas run dry, and the posts don’t bear much fruit. It’s not surprising that such posts are ineffective. Their subject matter tends to be about typography, design awards, new projects–stuff that’s only marginally interesting–and that only to other designers. This is the kind of content that flows from an undefined content strategy which results from generalized positioning.

But blogs from specialized, narrowly positioned firms are far more interesting–especially to clients and prospects who are interested in content that relates to their industries. Let’s try this on. Imagine for a moment that your firm had a super sharp positioning, something like “trade show marketing for technology startups–we help you make the most of your trade show events.” This is perhaps an extreme example, but just imagine for a moment that this was your focus and expertise. Can you come up with half a dozen subjects that you could write about, if that was your expertise? Even without having the expertise I bet you could come up with a decent list. And for specialized firms compelling content ideas are easy to come by. And when a prospect discovers them, the sales process is near to closing even before your phone rings or your email comment form gets filled out.

Web strategy is like an axe, the blade is a content strategy, and its sharpness is defined by your positioning. So sharpen your axe, and you won’t have to exert as much effort in your marketing.

On Wednesday, I noticed that Smashing Magazine had just updated their blog with a new post called Useful Web Design E-Mail Newsletters. After reading it, I decided to post a message to them on Twitter, saying, "Great list of web newsletters, though you forgot ours ;-)" and included a link to our newsletter page. Shortly after, they messaged back to let me know that they'd added the Newfangled newsletter to their list. I was surprised!

Within an hour, we started getting a bunch of new subscriptions to our newsletter. You can see from the image below, which shows the on-page stats box that appears on our newsletter landing page when we're logged in to our CMS, that our typical direct traffic to that page tends to be less than 10 unique visits per day. However, the Smashing Magazine link directed 470 unique visitors to that page over the past two days. It's not an overwhelming amount of traffic, but it's certainly more than normal for this particular page.



What's even more exciting to see is that the goal conversion rate for this traffic was so high. In the screenshot below, I'm showing a similar blow-up of our on-page stat box, this time focusing on the conversion rate for this page. Over the past two days, we've had around 250 goals converted from the visits from Smashing Magazine readers who clicked the link to our newsletter page. That's a conversion rate of around 30%, compared to our sitewide rate of 1.7%.



To put this in perspective with the rest of the site, over the last month we've been averaging about 7 goal conversions a day from an average of 670 unique visits each day. You can see how even a little boost in traffic from the right source can be very valuable. Smashing Magazine's audience is right in line with our positioning as partners to creative agencies, which is why we gained so much value from a boost in traffic of only a few hundred visitors.

Now that Eric, our former CEO, is off to new heights in his career, I've invited him to contribute a few guest blog posts. This is the third of several that he'll contribute in the coming months.

After studying at the Rhode Island School of Design, Eric Holter worked as an engraver and illustrator for Pagano, Schenck & Kay Advertising, then as a web designer at Leonard/Monahan. He founded Newfangled Web Factory in 1995.

In the recent HOW magazine article, Rock Your Website, Chicago-based Remedy was one of the featured website examples. Remedy is a good example of an agency website, but I’m not quite ready to push it into the "great" column. It’s on the edge though, and with a few adjustments I think it could become one of the great examples of an agency website.

Positioning: Remedy has already done the hard part. They’ve taken the step of defining a narrow positioning in the healthcare market. And they’ve identified their approach to healthcare marketing–they move healthcare brands toward expressions that overcome our consumer aversions and negative pre-dispositions of hospitals and healthcare services in general.

The only positioning weakness (as it’s represented in their website) I see is on their services list. It contains a few too many categories, and uses the word “Brand” a bit too much.

I also see “public relations” listed at the end of the list. Whenever I see this it makes me immediately think that the list is just trying to cover too much ground. I may be completely wrong about this criticism as it applies to Remedy (for all I know they may have significant public relations expertise) but I see it so often, and usually at the end of the list–that it casts doubt. I’m always is favor of shorter, more defined service lists that relate more closely to expertise.

Content: The content strategy is framed-up and heading in the right direction. But this is where the site needs a bit of work. Their portfolio content is excellent. They’ve provided written details covering several facets of each project’s strategy and process.

In addition, they just stared a quarterly newsletter–so there is only one issue so far. In my opinion quarterly publication is the absolute minimum schedule for an agency newsletter, bi-monthly would be better. Hopefully, they’re working on the 4th quarter newsletter. For some reason, the link to the newsletter (and come of the other areas of the site) launch new browser windows. I’m not sure why they’d do this, it feels awkward to me.

They also have a “New” section. It’s almost a blog–and that’s the problem. If it’s not a blog it’s purpose is a little confusing. It might be intended as a simple “News and Events” list, in which case I’d simplify the layout and add dates to each item. But if it is supposed to be blog-like, I’d press it further into blog form by including RSS, author, comments, categories, link bait, etc.

Platform: Y’all know what a big fan I am of Flash. While Remedy does use Flash for their homepage, they are commendably restrained its use inside the site. They also provide text links into the main sections outside of the Flash movie. Nevertheless, I always feel that the choice to use Flash for impact on the homepage is a poor one. It’s hard for me to understand why you’d relinquish the powerful opportunity to leverage your site’s content by linking to it from the home page–for the sake of one dynamic graphic. But that is the “creativity barrier” in action.

I can’t detect the use of a CMS. The site is written in PHP, so there may be some site updating tools available. I suspect, though, that it’s hand-coded, especially since I randomly encountered a broken link on the sitemap page (Jessica Daly’s bio). This is usually just a typo in the coding–an automated CMS wouldn’t likely have this kind of error.

And finally, as far as platform goes, the browser titles need optimizing. The home page’s browser title, for example, should contain “healthcare marketing” in it. This is an almost universal oversight so I don’t usually knock too many points off for this.

Design: My design comments relate primarily to information design and usability. Most agency sites are going to look good. The main navigation system is a little weird. When I click one of the main links (Who, What, How, and New) I don’t go anywhere. Yet if I click the same links in the footer navigation they do resolve to overview pages. The final critique on interfaced design is the main navigation for the portfolio. The navigation area allows for scrolling and clicking their list of clients and projects. But the space only allows four items to be viewed at any time. This makes it difficult to browse. A rollover, drop-down that lists all the items would be much more usable–especially since there are only about eight or so in the full list.

I think remedy is on a trajectory toward an excellent agency website. Opening up their platform and pushing the content strategy a bit further may get just them there.

The Archives possesses some 70,000 of these foot-and-a-half military recordings, each of which has a playing time of about two hours. It would take a researcher who worked without interruption for eight hours a day approximately 48 years to listen to this collection in its entirety. "A lot of them may contain a lot of nothing, airwave noise, shortwave whistles, but you may have to listen to the whole thing to figure that out," Mayn said.

A World of Methuselahs
A detailed overview of how life expectancy averages have increased significantly in the last century, and what our expectation should be for continuing increase. Before the article somewhat devolves into a primer on American healthcare policy changes, it covers some really interesting perspectives on how we might extend lifespans, who would benefit, and whether it would be desirable to live much longer than we do now. A quote:

People almost everywhere could extend their life spans further just by doing a few sensible things, such as not smoking, drinking only in moderation, eating lots of fruit and vegetables and taking regular exercise. Educated folk are better at keeping to such rules, and as a group they live markedly longer than those with only basic schooling. Richer people, unfairly, also live longer than less well-off ones, even in the developed world.

But all this is tinkering at the edges. Mankind’s dream has been to conquer ageing altogether, and scientists are working on it. Spare-part surgery to replace worn-out bits of the anatomy is already well-established and will get better with the use of stem-cell technology. For a more general effect, experiments on rodents have shown that a severely restricted but balanced diet can increase their lifespan by about 30%. But nobody knows whether this would work in humans, and even if it did, there might be few takers.

The Three Hardest Words to Say
This is the second post I've encountered recently where the author has been extremely honest about something that I think causes us all a lot of unnecessary anxiety. I admit that I say these three words far less than I should. I'd love to see myself and others take this seriously and be ok with being fallible humans.

Calling Bull****on Social Media
Exhilaratingly honest and a must-read for anyone working in an "online" industry or any social media enthusiast. Every point he makes I have though of before, yet never had the courage to say publicly. It's ironic that in a time of unprecedented connection with other humans, we have such a hard time actually *being* human. I cheered as I read.

In Our Time with Melvyn Bragg
This is a weekly, one-hour audiocast produced by the BBC. Melvyn Bragg will gather several academics to discuss various ideas that tend to cover history, philosophy, religion, etc. Usually a very spirited conversation with lots of great insights from Bragg and his guests.

OnPoint with Tom Ashbrook
This is a daily audiocast produced by NPR and broadcast out of WBUR in Boston. The program airs twice each morning, each a one-hour topic with guests and discussion. The program covers lots of stuff from current events to science, literature, philosophy, politics, etc. The host is a fantastic moderator and brings in top-notch guests. One of Friday's broadcasts is always devoted to a review of the week in the news. A great way to stay abreast of all things current.

To the Best of Our Knowledge
A weekly PRI audiocast that describes itself as an "audio magazine of ideas," TBOOK puts out two one-hour programs a week covering all kinds of topics but organized by a specific theme (recent ones have been "There's No Place Like Home," "How We Remember," and "Animal Minds") and comprised of interviews and audio documentary. Excellent production.

The Spark
A weekly CBC Radio audiocast hosted by Nora Young that describes itself as an "ongoing conversation about technology and culture." That pretty much says it, but they get props for always being on the cutting edge of current tech trends- not in terms of products, though, but in terms of cultural shifts. Pretty good stuff.

Radio Lab
This one-hour audiocast is produced by WNYC radio, who release five new episodes each season. Hosted by Jad Abumrad and NPR science correspondent Rober Krulwich, RadioLab brings intricately produced shows where "science meets culture and information sounds like music." This broadcast is truly unlike any other that I have heard and sets the bar for radio production very high. It is truly a treat to experience!

Speaking of Faith with Krista Tippett
A weekly, one-hour audiocast from APM hosted by Krista Tippet that uses interviews to discuss religion, meaning, ethics, and ideas in an all-inclusive and sensitive way.

Most of the smart, creative, successful people I know spend a good deal of time looking for inspiration, tracking down ideas and doing research. We do all those things too, we just don’t have a problem with calling it what it is, “goofing around.” Play is essential, it’s through play that you find connections between things that might not be at all obvious through logic or practicality. If you don’t have any accidents how are you ever going to have happy ones?

"A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. The inverse proposition also appears to be true: A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system." - John Gall (http://www.daringfireball.net/2009/04/complex)

(1) a new website for an existing business that has already operated online, (2) a new website for a business that has a working offline model but has never done ecommerce, or (3) a new website for an entirely new (and untested) business model.

"are going to be very interested in large data sets, because embedded in these data-sets is the ability to look at our society at high levels of granularity. You can see the individuals, but you can also see the trends. And they can ask new and original questions that help them to understand who and what we were better. It's in that base of information that the greatest knowledge about our contemporary society is being held."

"We are today using international law in a heartless fashion, for we think only of those who are alive here and now and shut our eyes to the rest of the vast family of humanity who are yet to come. This forecloses to future generations their rights to the basic fundamentals of civilized existence: acknowledging them as holders of rights in the eyes of our law.”

"At the very top, in the seething surface layer of the Epipelagic the Web is a boiling mass of life. A rising storm of thrashing users. An unimaginably massive number of interactions. The waters are hot. Currents flow fast. Waves crash and spume flies as millions of short messages rip back and forth across the surface. Links and people collide in a foamy chaos of tangling and untangling networks... This top layer - the scalding Photic cauldron of short messages and streaming data visualisations - is where it’s at. The top layer has become a lens for finding content further down. The surface is now where I look for new stuff, where I ask questions (search) and where I discover the vast Web of sites, pages, documents and content hanging lower down in the depths. This layer is connected to that which lurks below through trillions of filaments and capillaries."

"This is why things that blow up and become hugely popular on the web do so at the top strata. Because there's so much mixing and overlap. However, the lower strata are crucially important. Because of their more narrow focus and secluded environment, they create a qualitatively different relationship between the explorer and their discovery."

"Social media are primarily Internet-based tools for sharing and discussing information among human beings."

Tim Johnson

We have this picture of Big Brother as an unpleasant, monolithic, dictatorial entity that overtly controls us against our will. The reality is Big Brother is a fuzzy, friendly little gnome we invited in ourselves, and we pay money to be controlled by. It's easier than being free.

Chris Butler

I completely agree. In my post from last week about cloud computing and privacy, I looked at a talk given by Brad Templeton, who warned that we are making critical decisions in regard to our privacy and technology without really being aware of it. In the comments section we started a pretty good discussion about it, in which I remarked, "we could end up having made critical decisions in regard to privacy based upon benefits we see and experience now (i.e. free productivity tools, ease of use, compatibility, etc.) that may only have severely negative ramifications later. Perhaps another way of saying this is that we need to take a longer view of decisions like these, bearing in mind a potential cause and effect chain of events that may be two to three steps removed from the immediate result." I quote this because I think what we're talking about here is enabling the "fuzzy" big brother that you mentioned, not the monolithic force we're expecting will come along and subdue us against our will. Perhaps there's some synergy in this, but this morning I saw a post about the 60th anniversary edition of George Orwell's 1984, which showed a really nice cover design that seems to illustrate your interpretation of Big Brother rather nicely:

Wired makes a fantastic magazine. The "puzzle" edition last month was just brilliant, and I skimmed it from cover to cover. But for technology and pop science reporting, the market has moved on. Tech magazines, now matter how well executed, are nothing more than a cute anachronism, with the same sort of boutique market as hand-made stationery. Which isn't to say that we or anyone else who writes for money isn't doomed; we just don't have to buy paper by the ton roll, nor keep a support staff around nearly as large as our editorial staff.

Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed - whatever they grew from, they morphed into a realtime CMS for the emerging media. Twitter, not RSS, became the early warning system for new content. Facebook, not RSS, became the social Rolodex for events, casual introductions to RSS’ lifeblood, the people behind the feeds. FriendFeed, not RSS, captured the commentsphere. RSS got locked out of its own party.

Today, RSS is a shell of its former self, casually subsumed as the transport for 140+ content into the social stream. There, RSS items are fed into aggregators and husked for their behavioral signals, packaged as Tweets and sold for pennies on the whuffie dollar. The mainstream media, once cowed by the fulltexters, now masquerades as blog sites and competes for shortened URLs alongside the bloggers they deride under their breath.

Sash - May 6th, 2009 at 3:30 am PDT
...to think that Steve is not clued up enough to realize the only way to effectively track keywords on twitter is through RSS is unbelievable. i guess he just sits in front of his TweetDeck and watches the feed full time, haha !

Farnham - May 6th, 2009 at 6:42 am PDT
Maybe separate client RSS Readers are dead, or unnecessary, since RSS is part of all browsers and most portals, but RSS dead? Might as well say HTML is dead. Not used as standalone much, but RSS and HTML and XML are some of the bones needed to keep the sexier stuff (and fluff) from collapsing on the floor as a glob of amorphous, gelatinous goop. Flame rating - 5

"Your webmail is less under your control than it would be if you downloaded your mail to your computer. If you use Salesforce.com, you're relying on that company to keep your data private. If you use Google Docs, you're relying on Google. This is why the Electronic Privacy Information Center recently filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission: many of us are relying on Google's security, but we don't know what it is. This is new. Twenty years ago, if someone wanted to look through your correspondence, he had to break into your house. Now, he can just break into your ISP. Ten years ago, your voicemail was on an answering machine in your office; now it's on a computer owned by a telephone company. Your financial accounts are on remote websites protected only by passwords; your credit history is collected, stored, and sold by companies you don't even know exist."

Ted

If someone wants their information, even on a profile, to be private, they should be able to. It's theirs! Who can tell someone else what's public or private?

Chris Butler

One thing that Vanessa Grigoriadis points out in her article is that Facebook has the most sophisticated privacy controls of any social network before it. But what I think is the point here is that, with the MySpace court case, the user chose to post certain information on their profile. It was only when that information got them into trouble that the user wanted it to be "private." The point is that you can't have something be public and then take back its "public-ness" after it becomes incriminating. To your last point ("it's theirs"), Grigoriadis also points out that all that content you upload to your Facebook account is NOT yours anymore. It belongs to Facebook!

"When you have something on the computer in your house, it is protected by the Fourth Amendment. If you put something on a computer owned by Facebook, it is not protected by the Fourth Amendment. It is only protected in some cases—email has a law that protects email and medical data has a law that protects medical data, and there are laws governing banking records. Specific laws protect certain types of data, but by changing the way we do computing so that all of our data is stored in the cloud we are effectively moving all of our personal data out of our houses and into big data warehouses, and we are erasing a line from the Bill of Rights.We may decide that we want to do that, but I want to make sure that we do not do it casually."

"This isn't a technological problem; it's a legal problem. The courts need to recognize that in the information age, virtual privacy and physical privacy don't have the same boundaries."

Thanks for sharing all this data. Do you have a longer range of data for your newsletter tracking? I'm interested in speculating the reasons the numbers vary so widely.

"There is after all another option. We may give up extensive growth for an intensive bond. This may be the time to say "ok, let's build a better connection with our community." I mean, that's the business we're in. That's what we're for. And who is to say that intensive "growth" is not better than extensive growth. MySpace has yet to find a way to pay, but perhaps it has yet to produce right amount or kind of value. And this may be the outcome of an intensive strategy. It's early days. The logic of capitalism and new media will continue to bump up against one another in this way. Corporations will eventually begin to think more intelligently about the new creature in its midst. Just not yet.

"We realized that the message is increasingly out of our control and that we have to roll with it," Mr. De La Garza said. "For us it all rests on the quality of this product. We've all driven the Fiesta, and we felt so confident about the car that we could start this. We're going to allow people to tell the story [of the Fiesta] from their lives."

"You don't find anything out until you start showing it to people... Humans are really interesting. If you show them your idea in the prototype form, very few people will tell you all the things they think are right with it. But everybody will tell you all the things that are wrong with it. So you just write down, you copiously take notes about all those things and you fix them. And the next time you show up you have all those things fixed. It doesn't take very many times before you have a product that's delighting the people that you're making it for. And so, we call this enlightened trial and error."

"Twitter is much more than the collective musings of the tech-savvy elite. It’s a window into the public mind... Since the service tugs at our innermost navel-gazing, Vanity Smurf — by asking us to share whatever we’re thinking about — the flood of messages can deliver surprising insights into the digital pulse... As one friend and longtime devotee described it, Twitter is also a self-propagating recommendation engine. By carefully selecting which users and companies to follow, you can tailor a stream of steadily refreshed news that appeals to you, much better than any Google algorithm could."

"...But taken collectively, the stream of messages can turn Twitter into a surprisingly useful tool for solving problems and providing insights into the digital mood. By tapping into the world’s collective brain, researchers of all kinds have found that if they make the effort to dig through the mundane comments, the live conversations offer an early glimpse into public sentiment — and even help them shape it.

Soon, machines could twitter as much as people. Corey Menscher, a graduate student at New York University, developed the Kickbee, an elastic band with vibration sensors that his pregnant wife wore to alert Twitter each time the baby kicked: “I kicked Mommy at 08:52 PM on Fri, Jan 2!” Mr. Menscher is now considering selling the product.

Pairing sensors with Twitter leads some to think Twitter could be used to send home security alerts or tell doctors when a patient’s blood sugar or heart rate climbs too high. In the aggregate, such real-time data streams could aid medical researchers.

Already doctors use Twitter to ask for help and share information about procedures. At Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit, surgeons and residents twittered throughout a recent operation to remove a brain tumor from a 47-year-old man who has seizures. "

"A coworker recently said to me, 'I just can't seem to keep up. I feel like I'm falling behind technologically.' I can completely relate to that. It seems like every day that I run across some new idea and discover that it's not really that new- it's been discussed, blogged, shown in videos, etc. all over the internet, and I can start to trace the development of it over various sources as I try to catch up. Sometimes it's totally overwhelming."

"First of all, this is something that Emerson says that I quote in the article. He says that you need to not travel all the time in other people’s opinions. If you want to be able to think for yourself, if you want to be able to have original thoughts, which is not only good for you, but good for all of us, that we have people who are thinking creatively, you need to get away from other people’s opinions, other people’s values also, so you can chart your own direction. I think that’s the first value of solitude.

I also think we live such connected lives, such networked lives, that in a way, that’s a little harder to define. We lose a sense of our own integrity or our own selfhood. In the article, where I quote a passage or refer to a passage from Mrs. Dalloway from Virginia Woolf’s novel. The heroine, Mrs. Dalloway, goes up into her room in the middle of this very busy day of hers and just looks in the mirror and gathers herself together and remember who she is apart from her husband and the friend she’s inviting to her party and the busy London streets that she’s just been walking through, and very happily walking through. But she needs that time to, as I say, gather herself into herself. I think that’s another thing we lose when we lose solitude."

"I think that we are training our nervous systems to expect a certain and a certain kind of stimulation and I think it’s a kind of addiction, and...I’m not using that as a metaphor. Every time I check my email, I‘m looking for a little packet of pleasure that gets delivered when I get an email. I feel like I’m a rat with an electrode planted in my brain, stimulating myself... Rats will do that 2, 000 times an hour if this stimulus is pleasurable...

It’s because it’s this kind of addiction, and I think that when it’s withdrawn, we become anxious. But I think you’re right to be anxious about your anxiety because it suggests that we’re - my God! We’re losing the ability to do, or at least comfortably do, all kinds of things that really should be normal and natural and comfortable for us, like reading."

"...we're empowering a new era of personal recognition and fulfillment that extracts an unconditioned human response and shapes its unpredictable course and behavior over time... Some remain grounded while others immerse themselves into the never-ending chase of Internet fame and intellectual fortune. Either way, we're forever impacted by the sweet taste of significance that was previously only attainable by an elite few. In the process of adapting and cultivating personal communities, we lose a bit of who we are and adopt an aura of who we want to be."

“Connectivity is poverty” was how a friend of mine summarized [Bruce] Sterling’s bold theme. Only the poor — defined broadly as those without better options — are obsessed with their connections. Anyone with a strong soul or a fat wallet turns his ringer off for good and cultivates private gardens that keep the hectic Web far away. The man of leisure, Sterling suggested, savors solitude, or intimacy with friends, presumably surrounded by books and film and paintings and wine and vinyl — original things that stay where they are and cannot be copied and corrupted and shot around the globe with a few clicks of a keyboard.

Nice, right? The implications of Sterling’s idea are painful for Twitter types. The connections that feel like wealth to many of us — call us the impoverished, we who treasure our smartphones and tally our Facebook friends — are in fact meager, more meager even than inflated dollars. What’s worse, these connections are liabilities that we pretend are assets. We live on the Web in these hideous conditions of overcrowding only because — it suddenly seems so obvious — we can’t afford privacy. And then, lest we confront our horror, we call this cramped ghetto our happy home!

"Maybe the truth is that I wish I could get out of this place and live as I imagine some nondigital or predigital writers do: among family and friends, in big, beautiful houses, with precious, irreplaceable objects."

...by accident seems to be the mechanism, and so, we're already there. So now we're struggling through what to do about it. Templeton is warning that as we continue to settle in to our current way of being, our decisions will be critical to establishing the degree or extremity of the situation. How much privacy do we want and what do we want that to mean. If we just assume that all of these issues will work themselves out, we could end up in a world of hurt.

"we could end up having made critical decisions in regard to privacy based upon benefits we see and experience now (i.e. free productivity tools, ease of use, compatibility, etc.) that may only have severely negative ramifications later. Perhaps another way of saying this is that we need to take a longer view of decisions like these, bearing in mind a potential cause and effect chain of events that may be two to three steps removed from the immediate result."

...the issue was more a matter of a kind of pre-rational emotion than any legalistic parsing of rights. What people put up on Facebook was themselves: their personhood, their social worlds, what makes them distinctive and singular... I’m not sure that we can take ourselves out once we’ve put ourselves on there. We have changed the nature of the graph by our very presence, which facilitates connections between our disparate groups of friends, who now know each other. “If you leave Facebook, you can remove data objects, like photographs, but it’s a complete impossibility that you can control all of your data,” says Fred Stutzman, a teaching fellow studying social networks at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “Facebook can’t promise it, and no one can promise it. You can’t remove yourself from the site because the site has, essentially, been shaped by you.”

Kubrick dreamed of villains like this: nerds in fleece, controlling the information, calling their cult a family. It was an image, a kind of inchoate anxiety about the future, rather than anything you could put your finger on. In many conversations with privacy experts, it was hard to see what, specifically, was upsetting them so much; part of their strategy is clearly to pressure the big dog to set good policies now, so that others follow them later. Twenty years down the road, as algorithms and filtering mechanisms are significantly stronger and we’ve moved from PCs to home monitors with information stored in remote locations—“the cloud”—we will entrust ever more of ourselves to large data centers, many of which are already built around the Columbia River. Facebook already has tens of thousands of servers in a few data centers throughout the country, but this pales in comparison to Microsoft’s facility in Quincy, Washington: Their data center is the area of ten football fields, 1.5 metric tons of batteries for backup power, and 48 megawatts of electricity, enough to power 40,000 homes. An uncanny simulacrum of your life has been created on the web. It may not be too hyperbolic to talk about a digital self, as a fourth addition to mind, body, and spirit. It’s not the kind of thing that one wants to give away.

I went to the Customer Service office. There, a genial woman named Karen became my new best friend. She immediately began coordinating a multi-city search and rescue operation. Before I even finished explaining the situation, she was on the phone with an agent in New Haven to make arrangements for someone to dash onto the train and look for the device during the brief stopover there. She called the lost phone about a dozen times in hopes that someone would answer. At some point, a man did answer. His name was Mark and he was a conductor on the train. He promised that he would get the phone back to New York safely that evening. Karen’s liaison in New Haven organized a complicated hot handoff across the platform between Mark and a conductor southbound train. About four hours after I’d got off the train without, an Amtrak conductor walked up to me in Penn Station with a sealed envelope containing the lost phone. It was carefully bubble-wrapped...

It was an impressive operation in both a human and organizational sense. After all, Amtrak hadn’t done anything wrong – I’d just been a nitwit left an expensive thing sitting on seat in an empty train car. But about five or six very kind and competent employees really put themselves out to make up for that mistake.

"You are guaranteed success if you can break through the status quo and help create change within the agency; if you can practice craftsmanship at the highest level; and if you've got the operational genius to help people get the work done and still make it home for dinner."

I have come to think that online comments are a terrific addition to the conversation and that journalists need to take them seriously. Comments provide a forum for readers to complain about what they see as unfairness or inaccuracy in an article (and too often they have a point), to talk to each other (sometimes in an uncivilized manner) and, yes, to bloviate...I believe that it is useful to be reminded bluntly that the dark forces are out there and that it is too easy to forget that truth by imposing rules that obscure it. As Oscar Wilde wrote in a different context, "Man is least in himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth." Too many of us like to think that we have made great progress in human relations and that little remains to be done. Unmoderated comments provide an antidote to such ridiculous conclusions. It's not like the rest of us don't know those words and hear them occasionally, depending on where we choose to tread, but most of us don't want to have to confront them.

One of the things that I am concerned about is erasing the Fourth Amendment. For those who do not know, the Fourth Amendment is the line in the Bill of Rights that mostly relates to privacy. It says that you have the right be secure in your person, papers and effects, and people need a warrant to search your house or search your papers. Unfortunately, the Supreme Court and other courts of the United States have ruled that this wonderful Fourth Amendment does not apply when data is in the hands of third parties.

When you have something on the computer in your house, it is protected by the Fourth Amendment. If you put something on a computer owned by Facebook, it is not protected by the Fourth Amendment. It is only protected in some cases—email has a law that protects email and medical data has a law that protects medical data, and there are laws governing banking records. Specific laws protect certain types of data, but by changing the way we do computing so that all of our data is stored in the cloud we are effectively moving all of our personal data out of our houses and into big data warehouses, and we are erasing a line from the Bill of Rights.We may decide that we want to do that, but I want to make sure that we do not do it casually.

"I think these privacy issues really snuck up on people. We all got used to email, probably with a false sense of privacy. But services like Gmail just make the lack of privacy with email more plain. When you sent an email using AOL or some other service, it was easy to overlook the fact that your words were being passed through many servers and could easily be seen by other people (assuming people cared enough to hack it). Now, seeing ads along side your email makes it much more obvious that your email is not as much 'yours' as you thought."

Now here are three quick threats to keep you up at night. First of all, time traveling robots from the future. I actually don’t mean the governor of California. The time traveling robots from the future that I am talking about are all of the people in this room who are working on AI... You are going to get better at face recognition, speech recognition, identifying people from their voices and so on. Those AIs from the future are going to be able to come into the past—not literally...—but metaphorically in that they will be able to search all of these databases that we build now with better tools. They will be able to look at all the video that is being recorded today and all the ATM machines you used and say, 'Where was Brad on February 7 of 2009? Oh, our modern face recognition software can look through those old records and find out.' The sins of the past will be visited upon you in the future with tools that you did not know existed. The sins of the future will also be different from the sins of the past. You are doing really nasty things today that you don’t know are going to be very unpopular in the future, like Thomas Jefferson owning slaves, and stuff like that. I hope none of you own slaves.

All the technology we build is going to be used, starting here in the free society, but also gets deployed to China, Saudi Arabia and Future China... Imagine if Facebook had existed ten years ago and Falun Gong, the Chinese religion, had been on Facebook. It’s kind of a wacky religion, but that does not justify what has been done to them. If they had been on Facebook and everyone in the religion had connections to all their friends, when the Chinese government decided to round up everyone in Falun Gong, all they would have had to do is look at the social network. I imagine the next time the Chinese do want to round up some people, they can go into a social network."

MagCloud has similarities to LuLu.com as well; basically, you upload your finished magazine as a PDF file, which MagCloud then lists in its catalogue for no charge. When a customer wants a copy, they log in, pay the cost… and get a printed version made especially for them... I’ll go one step further - there are server-side software engines that can be used to stitch together PDFs from HTML files, so you could allow your reader to custom-build a magazine to their own specifications from your stock of stories and articles, and then buy a unique printed version.